History Main / NamesGivenToComputers

* '''Famous Figures, Places, or Things''': A common way of hinting at the [[AIIsACrapshoot nature]] and complexity of an AI [[note]][[VideoGame/BioShock2 TheThinker]], [[Franchise/MassEffect Legion]][[/note]]
* '''Human Names''' - used both as a source of ironic humor and as a way to indicate that an AI is truly sapient. Often overlaps with the Acronym convention.

* ''Film/{{Hackers}}'' has our hacker protagonists trying to hack a supercomputer called the Gibson, named in honor of Creator/WilliamGibson.

* Hex, the ClockPunk MagiTek computer of Unseen University in the ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' novels. In RealLife, it's a play on "hex", meaning spell, and "hexadecimal". InUniverse, it seems to have that name because that's the sort of name a computer should have, and much of Hex's construction was based on this principle, even if the wizards didn't know ''why'', or even what a computer ''was''.

** '''Religious''': Figures from mythology. It's not uncommon to see, for example, UNIX machines named [[Myth/Greek Mythology hermes, zeus, athena, and morpheus]], with Windows workstations being [[Myth/Norse Mythology odin, thor, freya]] and Android devices being [[Literature/TheBible michael, raphael, gabriel, lucifer]].

* '''[[FunWithAcronyms Acronyms]]''': By use of {{Shoehorned First Letter}}s if necessary.[[note]][[AC:[[Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey Heuristically programmed [=A Lgorithmic=] computer 9000]], [[VideoGame/{{Portal}} Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System]]]][[/note]]

* The unique computer from ''Literature/MondayBeginsOnSaturday'', possibly intelligent and definitely having a soul, is called "Aldan" after a river in Siberia.

* '''Famous Figures, Places, or Things''': A common way of hinting at the [[AIIsACrapshoot nature]] and complexity of an AI [[note]][[VideoGame/BioShock2 TheThinker]], [[MassEffect Legion]][[/note]]

->''"It's called the '''[[AC: Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator]]'''. Or, for short -- the ''[[TheUnpronounceable "flihsivdefuhr"]]''.''

* Creator/{{IBM}}'s first famous TabletopGame/{{Chess}}-playing computer, Deep Thought, was named after the computer that designed Earth in ''Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy''; IBM's later Deep Blue, the independently-developed Deep Fritz, and IBM's Blue Gene supercomputing products carried on the naming theme.

* As mentioned above, ''VideoGame/{{Portal}}'' is based around a human's dealings with the master control computer of a giant laboratory complex, who is named [=GLaDOS=]. [=GLaDOS=] is obsessed with conducting science experiments and has a skewed sense of morality. It is implied that she killed all other humans in the complex, though likely as a self defense measure to prevent them switching her off.

* EDI in ''Franchise/MassEffect'' is an acronym, with her name standing for Enhanced Defense Intelligence.

->"It's called the '''[[AC: Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator]]'''. Or, for short -- the ''[[TheUnpronounceable "flihsivdefuhr"]]''.

->"It's called the '''[[AC: Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator]]'''. Or, for short - the ''[[TheUnpronounceable "flihsivdefuhr"]]''.

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[[folder: Comic Books ]]

* W.O.T.A.N. in ComicBook/LutherArkwright is the supercomputer used on parallel 00.00.00 to keep track of events on other parallels in TheMultiverse.

[[folder: Fan Fiction]]
* ''FanFic/OnTheShouldersOfGiants'', a ''Franchise/MassEffect'' fic, almost universally employs name without meaning, ranging from fanciful to [[ShoutOut historically significant]] to indistinguishable from an organic being's given name.

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* ''Machinima/RedVsBlue'': The main AIs are named after the Greek alphabet. The first to be created is named Alpha, but the others' names are seemingly picked at random from the list, including Delta, Theta, Omega, Sigma...
** There's also F.I.L.S.S., Freelancer Integrated Logistics and Security System, pronounced "Phyllis." [[spoiler:Otherwise known as Sheila.]]
* There are not a lot of [=AIs=] in the Literature/WhateleyUniverse because of the ongoing threat of The Palm, but Loophole has an illegal [=AI=] named Carmen. Most disturbingly, the voice and holographic image for Carmen are modeled after [[spoiler: the mutant who raped her.]]
* Played with in ''WebAnimation/HomestarRunner'': Throughout the run of Strong Bad Emails, Strong Bad goes through a series of computers whose official names are deliberately uncreative [[ShapedLikeItself descriptions of themselves]] like "Compy" the desktop computer and "Lappy" the laptop.

[[folder: Western Animation ]]

[[folder: Real Life]]

* The real-life [[Franchise/CthulhuMythos Shub-Internet]] was named after a joke in the JargonFile and operated as a server in the Pentagon for a number of years. Obviously a very silly name without meaning, relating to the Internet's origins as a US Defense Department project.

* The first ISP in Russia, demos.ru, went online in 1989 and was used, among other things, as a news relay during the August Coup in 1991. It shares a name with DEMOS, a Unix clone developed at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in the early 80s; if demos.ru was actually a DEMOS system at the time, that would make it a rather lame mix of acronym and functional name. (But one with one hell of a history behind it.)[[note]]Even then, Soviet hackers always had a better sense of humor than their bosses; the original name for DEMOS was UNAS, which translates to "at ours" in Russian; see, "at theirs" in Russian is [[IncrediblyLamePun u nix...]][[/note]]

* ''Film/ShortCircuit'' and ''Short Circuit 2'' feature the military warrior robot Number 5, who develops a friendly and curious AI personality when he is struck by lightning. By the conclusion of the first movie he is tired of his sterile serial number name and decides to give himself a human name, henceforth becoming known as Johnny 5.
** Not many people remember, but his proper factory name was '''SAINT''' Number 5. SAINT standing for: Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport.
* ''Franchise/StarWars'' uses (and abuses) model number to a disturbing degree, given the rather small namespace that droids seem to have in that universe. Well, sometimes it does. The Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse has many droids being given nicknames, particularly in the ComicBook/XWingSeries where R2 and R5 droids are called things like Mynock, Whistler, Thirteen, Tonin, Gadget, Shiner, and Vape. Literature/GalaxyOfFear gives a computer an acronym name.
** The [[Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse Expanded Universe]] also has an annoying tendency to write out the serial numbers in the manner a first grader would. For example, 41D4 calls itself Forwundeefor. Likely halfhearted attempts at being like Artoo ('''R2'''-D2) and Threepio (C-'''3PO'''). At one point, Timothy Zahn played on this by creating a human character named Entoo Nee, who noted that people frequently assumed he was a droid. [[hottip:*:His full name was Entoo Needaan E-Elz, which sounds an awful lot like C3P0 actor Anthony Daniels...]]

* Over its long run, ''Series/DoctorWho'' has been all over this trope, from a war computer called [[Myth/NorseMythology WOTAN]] to the utilitarian Matrix (Gallifrey's equivalent of Franchise/StarTrek's Memory Alpha) to mastermind AIs like BOSS and Mentalis and functionally-named robots like Kamelion and K-9. Ironically, arguably the most important AI in the series, the Doctor's TARDIS, has no known name at all.
** According to series 6, it's [[spoiler: "Sexy".]]

* The supercomputer ''Pinball/{{Xenon}}'' is a Type VI and has no meaning other than sounding exotic.

* In the classic computer game VideoGame/SystemShock, the villain is a corrupt AI computer named SHODAN, Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network. After being corrupted by the player character and developing a malevolent AI, SHODAN eliminates her human masters and begins a scheme to escape her space station home and transmit her personality into the computers of planet earth.

This practice is TruthInTelevision. While more common in the era of UsefulNotes/MainframesAndMinicomputers, the practice of giving computers clever pet names still remains popular among hardcore computer enthusiasts and IT departments. In addition to using the same naming conventions already mentioned, there are several additional patterns found in the naming of real-world computers, servers, robots, and networks. As one might expect when [[OneOfUs certain personality types]] become involved, these can be a bit odd:

* Franchise/{{Tron}} has a tendency to go nuts with these, as most of the characters are sentient computer Programs. The title character? Short for "electronic" (though there is a real-world BASIC command with the name). Tron's two apprentices in the ''WesternAnimation/TronUprising'' animated series were named Beck and Cyrus after a graphical rendering algorithm. FreezeFrameBonus material in Film/TronLegacy show a lot of Programs that were named for real-world computer scientists, and ''VideoGame/TronTwoPointOh'' went crazy with it, giving virus-infected Programs names like Duradanal and Rampancy, the security software names like [[BlandNameProduct Morton and Spoolserv'', Resource Hog gangsters names like Exploder and Photo Edit, etc.

->"It's called the '''[[AC: Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator]]'''. Or, for short - the ''[[NoPronunciationGuide "flihsivdefuhr"]]''.

''Manga/DetectiveConan'': One of the characters from the Night Baron Murder Case has named his laptop „Satomi“, the name of his late mother, and he treats his laptop like his girlfriend. Conan is creeped out by this.

* ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'': The three NERV mainframes are called Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar after the [[Literature/TheBible Three Wise Men]].

* Series/BlakesSeven gave us Orac[[note]]a stand-alone super computer that could be carried around[[/note]], Zen [[note]]the central computer on ''The Liberator''[[/note]] and Slave[[note]]the central computer on ''Scorpio''[[/note]]. In this case they were {{Meaningful Name}}s -- Orac was (though [[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness only in its introductory episode]]) an oracle, extrapolating future events from the data it collected. The alien computer Zen was presented as a keeper of mysterious knowledge. Slave had been programmed with a cringing subservient personality.

* Series/BlakesSeven gave us Orac[[note]]a stand-alone super computer that could be carried around[[/note]], Zen [[note]]the central computer on ''The Liberator''[[/note]] and Slave[[note]]the central computer on ''Scorpio''[[/note]].