Names Given to Computers

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"It's called the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator. Or, for short - the "flihsivdefuhr".
—Flint, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

In the real world, computers are typically given strictly functional names or serials (such as accounting_server or fx98v4p) in order to allow for identification. Since even professionals (both fictional and real) struggle with pronunciation and identification of an obscure manufacturing code, pop culture naturally has a tendency to seep into the naming of products.

While it initially wasn't prevalent fiction, writers and producers soon realized that naming computers was common practice, and proceeded to ramp it Up to Eleven it to make computer and robot names substantially more dramatic than groupings like "Cleo, Tony and Jules".

In order to make an AI seem sinister or awesome enough, a few themes are typically adhered to in movies and literature that can allow said AI be categorized into six groups;

This trope was perhaps more common in the era of Mainframes and Minicomputers; these days, if you see a computer with a name, it will likely be a robot of some sort, an artificial intelligence, a niche product trying to attract attention, or a mixed combination of the three. This may reflect real life; a lot of non-techies never bother to give their computers names.

Trope Namer is this page on the Portland Pattern Repository. Note that this trope is specifically about computers, robots, and AIs that are given abnormal titles; see Named Weapons, I Call It "Vera" and I Call Him "Mister Happy" for other named items, and Named After Somebody Famous for names that are sometimes given to computers in Real Life but rarely used in fiction. Note that an aversion of this trope involves a bland AI in an extraordinary setting (e.g. a computer named "computer" in a high space opera setting).

See also Robot Names and NameTron.

Examples of Names Given to Computers include:

Film

  • Iron Man has several robots with names from Dummy and Butterfingers to JARVIS.
  • Short Circuit 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.
  • Star Wars uses (and abuses) Type 3 to a disturbing degree, given the rather small namespace that droids seem to have in that universe.
  • Terminator has Skynet, but the individual Terminators don't have onscreen names, just model numbers.

Literature

  • Isaac Asimov's robots are given American first names with a similar pronunciation to that of their official two-letter model designation. For example, robots of the RB series becomes Robbie, TN robots are called Tony, and JN becomes Jane. (There was some debate whether to call the heavily-armored ZZ robots "Sissy.") Robots built by the Spacers have regular first and last names, but they are always prefixed with the letter R (for robot).
  • The unique computer from Monday Begins on Saturday, possibly intelligent and definitely having a soul, is called "Aldan" after a river in Siberia.
  • The Xanth series has a computer named Com Pewter.

Live-Action TV

  • Over its long run, Doctor Who has been all over this trope, from a war computer called WOTAN to the utilitarian Matrix (Gallifrey's equivalent of Star Trek'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.
  • Star Trek, in general, tends to be surprisingly mundane -- AIs tend to have personal names (Data, Lore, Vaal, Landru) or bear legacy names (Nomad, Voyager), and non-intelligent computers seldom have names at all. There is a scattering of Type 3, such as M-5 from the TOS episode "The Ultimate Computer" and a different M-5 from the TOS episode "Requiem for Methuselah". And the Enterprise's computer is almost always named "computer". The Borg, though not computers, tend to have names/designations related to their location and function such as Seven of Nine.[3]

Music

  • Albums by the band Big Black credited their TR-606 drum machine as a member of the band named "Roland." Later when the bass player quit to enter law school the band's press release stated the band was breaking up because Roland quit due to "creative differences."

Video Games

  • Half-Life 2 and its expansions feature the burly robot "Dog". As the name implies, Dog was built to be a pet of Alyx Vance's. He understands human commands, but can not speak himself, communicating mostly through head gestures. Like a playful dog, Dog sometimes gets over excited and carried away and has to be told by Alyx to stop whatever he's doing.
  • Halo uses a mixture of Type 6 and mundane names—Cortana, the UNSC AI, is named after the sword of Holger the Dane from The Song of Roland (thus a nod to Marathon's Durandal), but the Forerunner AIs have rather mundane, vaguely religious names like Guilty Spark and Mendicant Bias.
  • EDI in Mass Effect is of type 1, with her name standing for Enhanced Defense Intelligence.
  • 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.
    • In addition to GLaDOS's return, Portal 2 also features a major AI character named Wheatley, who is no more than a robotic ball who relies on transport rails or the player to take him where he needs to go.
  • In the classic computer game System Shock, 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.

Web Comics

  • Questionable Content's AnthroPCs generally have personal names (like Winslow and Momo-tan), though Pintsize is a somewhat jocular Type 2 and one-shot character PT410x (likely a serial number or, since PT 410 x was owner-constructed, a fanciful type 3) eschews the very idea of a "slave name".

Web Original

  • In the Chaos Timeline, several AIs named themselves after random strings - three of them are called X27, a_gcl and Horace.

Western Animation

Real Life

  • The real-life Shub-Internet was named after a joke in the Jargon File and operated as a server in the Pentagon for a number of years. Obviously a very silly type-6, relating to the Internet's origins as a US Defense Department project.


  1. ↑ Frequently rather contrived
  2. ↑ i.e. derived from the Univac brand
  3. ↑ , Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01
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