More from TIMEasia: Japanese personalize their machines. They give names to their office PCs and printers, their factory robots, their cell phones, CD players and Game Boys. Such playful intimacy with inanimate objects made of acrylic, silicon and liquid-crystal displays may seem unnatural. But electronic devices are so vital to Japanese lives that they become virtual family members.
I dunno about family members, but I’ve been naming technology for years, usually after gods, based on their function and (yes, they have them) their personalities.
My laptop is a G3 Powerbook named after Ebisu, a Japanese god of business and finance — which makes sense, I suppose, since the computer is primarily a work machine. It’s a fairly reliable machine, although sometimes it gets stuck processing some small bit of protocol, forcing me to wait until it politely comes back to the point. Prior to that, I had an older Powerbook called Telchines. Utterly unreliable and prone to wicked acts, it was named after some tech-savvy sea demons from classical mythology.
I used to have an iMac named Orpheus. It was orange and it had a eclipse-like dawn screensaver on it, so that made sense. It was a replacement machine for Morpheus (an Apple Quadra 800) which was a replacement for my first “real” computer, an old Mac Classic also named Morpheus. Those were the first machines I wrote on, hence the name.
I still have the Classic, the first Morpheus. It feels wrong to get rid of it when it’s lasted so long — even if it no longer connects to anything. From time to time I get it out and stick it somewhere, running a screensaver of quotes and phrases from my favorite writers. One day it will die — flickering, quietly whispering to itself before it fades, like all old gods, away.
I’m a big fan of Zombie Technology — things that are are so out of date they should be dead but, somehow, aren’t. I have two Apple Newtons that still get daily use: a 2100 named Murphy (an Old English variation of Morpheus) and an eMate 300 named Hermes because it’s a great traveling alternative to a heavy laptop.
But it’s not just computers. My first iPod was named Calliope, the second one is (more accurately) named Euterpe. And my cell phone is named Khepri because it looks like a beetle and it buzzes at me and sometimes I want to stomp on it.
At some point, I would like to get one of the new titanium Powerbooks — sleek and muscular and polished. I even have the named picked out already…