Our family has a tradition of naming our various computers after stars and star constellations. Various appellations have included Sirius, Castor and Pollux (matching IBM ThinkPads wouldn’t you know), Pixis, and Betelgeuse. In a variation on the theme, I named my Toshiba Satellite laptop Oshumi after Japan’s first space satellite.
However, the desktop that for the longest time served as our network center was the exception to our enjoyable familial rule. Having too much of a fondness what he saw as a tragic victim of conflicting program directives, my husband deemed him Hal 9000.
And he came to us in 2001. Given the timing, resistance was futile. (Yeah, yeah, I know, Borg is Borgm but I can extend the metaphors only so far.)
Hal more than adequately did his job for us for many years. Then, early this year, he began to lose his ability to generate clean graphics. He also refused to be a good liaison between our printer and Oshumi. The former was likely a matter of a busted graphics card, the latter a lack of babel-fish for Vista. (Hal was Win2000-based.)
We swapped him out for an older emachine we had laying around. It was XP-based and could liaison, but over time we came to realize that the machine was as slow as a snail. If ever a computer could be equated to watching paint dry, it was this one. It’s no Hal 9000. When we boot it up, we wait and wait and wait for it to come around.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband quipped about some modern drama trivia we had encountered recently. “Maybe we should change it’s name,” he jested. I had to agree, even though it broke our stellar tradition.
The computer’s new name? Godot.