hen my first class account (warm078@some-class-machine) was being closed (December 86), I needed somewhere to move my class files. I'd heard about this open-access machine, ucscb, and decided that would be a good place to store my files between classes. So I opened an account. I didn't know that it was customary to choose interesting login names, so I used my initials, jhdiii. I didn't really intend to do anything else at all with my b account - socializing was something I was not at all interested in at that time - but bit by bit I was sucked in. By mid-87 I had been sucked to the point that I wanted a more interesting login name, so I chose one that was meaningful to me, "spcman" (being even more into space stuff then than I am now). Logins were still restricted to 7 characters at this time.

Message 489 (0 left): Fri Sept 25 6:01pm
From: Zaphod, Fugitive Galactic Prez (spcman@ucscb)
Subject: Guess who?

Hey! It's me! I finally changed my login to something truly deep and meaningful (at least to me). So, change your .whom, your .buddy, your .wf to "spcman John". Also, the new home of BoFf is ~spcman/public/BoFf, and AllNight forum is ~spcman/ public /allnight.dir/ AllNight. Actually it may be a bit till Jon gets around to making those work in their new homes... Oh yes... who was I?

jhdiii (hey, some people don't use see_uid).

From spcman Thu Oct 29 18:18:34 1987
To: falcon@k
Subject: my login


you asked a while ago why i didn't use "spacman". Well I'll tell you...
I didn't because it would be an anagram of SPAMCAN!!! SO THERE!!!
JoHn!

BUT... certain friends (Karine/teddy and Tanya/tavia started it) immediately began refering to me as space *cadet* for reasons that should be obvious. That amused me enough that I decided to change my login to some contraction of it. I was going to use 'spccdt', but Karine and Tanya, who had undue influence upon me, insisted that that was just no good... not obvious enough what it meant.

Karine wanted me to use 'spaccdt' or 'spccadt' or some such, which I thought were icky. Finally settled on 'spcecdt' and made that change in Dec 87. But not everyone liked it...

From dem6th Wed Dec 16 18:52:12 1987
From: dem6th (*****The SIXTH DEMENTION****)
To: spcecdt
Subject: Re: Account name change

I HATE YOU!!!!!

deepthought initially had 7-character logins (XENIX 2.3.0), so I kept the same name. I eventually upgraded all of the utmp-reading utilities to allow for 8-character logins, but decided to keep spcecdt.

Other logins I've chosen:

pyro@gorn, back when gorn was a true-blue 8088 box (I think the login screen called it a "Piece-O-Shit PC") running XENIX 2.0.

armoror@b, when I asked someone to get me an account 'cuz I wasn't a student.

Oh, and this discussion has been ever popular...

From spcman Fri Nov 13 16:56:31 1987
To: life
Subject: Re: nothing in particular

"How did you pick your account name" is sort of the Unix equivalent of "what's your sign?"...