What's Your Printer's Name? Richard M. Stallman When I was installing a new typeface for the EMACS manual on a laser printer system at the lab, I noticed that the initialization menu included a slot for changing the printer's name, which appeared on the cover sheet of each user's output. Our printer had the cutesy and meaningless name "Tremont". It was my duty as a hacker to replace it with something more fun. I chose "Kafka", to bring up disturbing associations. (Did you hear about the man who woke up as a laser printer one morning?) For the next few days, other hackers kept talking about the new name, and suggesting additional amusing names ("Treemunch", "Thesiscrunch", "Cthulhu"...). I gave each name a few days, while collecting more suggestions. It was great fun for just about everyone. The one exception was a professor who told me that I was not authorized to do this, and that I should stop. I replied that I knew first-hand that people were having fun as a result, and therefore was obliged to continue, least as long as the suggestions held up. Finally, I told him, in stern and official terms, that he was not authorized to say that hacking was unauthorized. The poor guy didn't let it end there. He said, "If you think renaming the printer is so much fun, why don't you rename the PDP-10's?" This was a truly brilliant idea, for which I remain grateful. The next day, the DM machine (home of Zork) was called "Dungeon Modelling", the ML machine (used for research in medical decision making) was called "Medical Liability", the MC (Macsyma Consortium) was "Maximum Confusion", and AI was called "Anarchists International". He didn't complain again.