Comment by vkazanov
Most of us will have a problematic joint or two by a certain age. Almost none of us will be recognised by any name by that time.
Most of us will have a problematic joint or two by a certain age. Almost none of us will be recognised by any name by that time.
I'm not sure what your point is here. OP was clearly using "three letter guy" in the sense "so famous people know them by their initials". This is hardly unread of, e.g. https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeLetterPerson
It was the "Great to see _some_ 3letter guy into this" underlined some that.
It felt bit like s/some/random/g perhaps would apply when reading it. Intentional or not by writer. It made me long and write my comment. There are many 3letter user accounts, which some are more famous than others. To my generation not because they were early users, but great things what they have done. I'm early user too and done things then still quite widely being used with many distributions, but wouldn't compare my achievements to those who became famous and known widely by their account, short or long.
Anyhow I thought that "djb" ring bell anyone having been around for while. Not just those who have been around early 90 or so when he was held renegade opinions he expressed programming style (qmail, dj dns, etc.), dragged to court of ITAR issues etc.
But because of his latter work with cryptography and running cr.yp.to site for quite long time.
I was just wondering, did not intend to start argument fight.
Yes: the fame is the subtext. It's akin to mononyms; they'd be referring to famous people like Shakira, Madonna, or Beyoncé. A lot of us have first names, but the point isn't that one's family calls them "Dave" without ambiguity.
There were many unix instances, and likely multiple djb logins around the world, but there's only one considered to be the djb, and it's dur to fame.
Mate, we're not talking about the future, but about 3 letter guys now. I'm one, I've carried it with me for 40+ years as have the ten or twenty peers of mine I know by their tla. I got it at pobox.com when the door opened, the guy at the desk next door got a one letter name. I set up campus email for the entire uni in 1989 and gave myself the tla with my superuser rights before that. I'd done the same at ucl-cs in 85, and before that in Leeds and York.
My point here is we're not famous we're just old enough to have a tla from the time before HR demanded everyone get given.surname.
Every Unix system used to ship with a dmr account. It doesn't mean we all knew Dennis Ritchie, it means the account was in the release tape.
There are 17,000 odd of us. Ekr, Kre and Djb are famous but the other 17,573 of us exist.