Back in the late 80's I worked in a lab at Michigan State with a dozen or so SunOS Workstations, 2 Sun Fileservers, and a VAX8600 running Ultrix. All the Sun machines had odd, short names: bubo, mala, typh, pock, etc. It turns out the admin had named them all after diseases, but the management thought it was too much, so they all became 4-letter truncated diseases :) The VAX was renamed from sniffles to eecae (an acronym) at the same time. -Frank