Why "$mike"?

 Why "$mike"?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... I worked at the West Virginia Network for Educational Telecomputing (WVNET). At that time there were no less than four Mike's working there. Now this was at a time when email addresses were just random letters and numbers. For example, mine was un020312@vaxa.wvnet.edu. So, each Mike came up with a unique way to sign emails so people could tell us apart.

One person always capitalized the first two letters: MIke

Another used the first letter of his last name, Microsoft-style: mikek

I used a dollar sign: $mike

Which begs the question, why a dollar sign?

Ah, therein lies a story. VAX/VMS system service calls all start with SYS$. One of the calls is for creating a mailbox, SYS$CREMBX. A cow-orker of mine, Tom Dowdy, noticed the similarity to my last name, and started calling me "sys$crembx". So I signed my emails "sys$crembx". The evolution was

• sys$crembx
• sys$cremer
• sys$mike
• $mike

Et voilà!

p.s. I really need to come up with a better story...