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However, as long as you're here, you might find it mildly diverting
to know how this site -- tanstaafl.gws.uky.edu -- got its name. This
is the name of the system that formerly hosted my web and email
servers. The "uky.edu" part is easy: that's the University of
Kentucky, an institution of higher education. What about "gws"? Well,
that's the rather unimaginative designation for stray computers in the
UK domain; it stands for "general workstation". And "tanstaafl"?
That's the part that's most interesting, but it also sometimes causes
confusion. There was a time when this phrase was somewhat better known
than it now seems to be. It stands for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A
Free Lunch", and truer words were never spoken! The word apparently
traces its roots to Robert A. Heinlein's classic The
Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), though I've seen it chased
back (in the contracted form tnstaafl) to
the late-1800s/early 1900s.