Being a RACF geek and a contractor for roughly half my career I've seen most of the conventions people have shared here in this thread. The best laugh I get talking with other mainframe geeks though was from a large bank where the algorithm went:
First 5 letters of SURNAME + first initial of first name + first initial of middle name. Either of the last two single character fields could be cycled upwards alphabetically (starting from 'A') until a unique string was obtained in case the generated one was already allocated to someone. So my middle name is Francis and my userid became CAIRNCF - Cairns was a not uncommon surname in these parts, and thus I didn't get my forename in position 6, but did get my middle initial in position 7. The unfortunate fellow who's name is indelibly burned into my mind (and no doubt he has never heard this story) was Keith Allen Mumford - who the algorithm spat out as MUMFOKA... We decided to simply revoke that userid and roll the dice again. Cheers - Mike ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
