/X-Y-Z-Z-Y/, /X-Y-ziz'ee/, /ziz'ee/, or /ik-ziz'ee/ adj. [from the ADVENT game] The canonical `magic word'. This comes from ADVENT, in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures you find there. If you type `xyzzy' at the appropriate time, you can move instantly between two otherwise distant points. If, therefore, you encounter some bit of magic, you might remark on this quite succinctly by saying simply "Xyzzy!" "Ordinarily you can't look at someone else's screen if he has protected it, but if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you do it anyway." "Xyzzy!" Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undocumented no-op command on several OSes; in Data General's AOS/VS, for example, it would typically respond "Nothing happens", just as ADVENT did if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. In more recent 32-bit versions, by the way, AOS/VS responds "Twice as much happens". See also plugh.
Xyzzy was chosen for the host/site name largely because names based on our surname, house name and location were already taken. Since we are both hackers in the old sense of the word and spent quite some time playing Adventure on teletypes in our youth it seemed as good a name as any.
As we are not a company .com and .co.uk
made little sense and since no one to date seems to have come up
with a family or home domain .org.uk seemed
reasonable for a home account in the UK. As a family we're an
organisation, and certainly not profit making :-)
Although registration via FreeNetName was simple enough their dialup service proved unreliable and we subsequently moved the hosting to Crazy Penguin a Linux friendly provider. Unfortunatly Crazy Penguin disappeared and so we have now moved hosting to Designer Servers.
For more info on Adventure or the Colossal Cave and the meaning of Xyzzy try the links below.
Do you think there is any significance in the fact that "Nothing happens." the output most commonly envoked by the xyzzy command is message 42 in the original Adventure message file? 42 of course being the meaning of life the universe and everything.