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Comment by elchief | Hacker News Reader

According to the OpenBSD manual, yp stands for "yellow pee"

https://man.openbsd.org/yp

As I recall, it used to be officially called Yellow Pages in SunOS, but there was a dispute with British Telecom which owned the trademark on Yellow Pages, so Sun changed its name.

Wikipedia has (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Information_Service) the same story I remember, though doesn't give a source for it:

> Because British Telecom PLC owned the name "Yellow Pages" as a registered trademark in the United Kingdom for its paper-based, commercial telephone directory, Sun changed the name of its system to NIS, though all the commands and functions still start with "yp".

I always thought Yellow Pages was a generic term, but that's only in the USA. In other countries it's a trademark and owned by specific countries. TIL.

I understood that it originally stood for "yellow pages" because it is a directory service, but that the phone company asserted their trademark on the term.

Sun also initially named their zones project “Kevlar” that they got a notice for...

https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Community+History

My favorite one of these stories is about the "butthead astronomer". :)

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/butt-head-astronomer.ht...

Off topic: Are the Yellow Pages still a thing?

In case you're asking about the older product, yes I still get a phone book on my porch every 6 months to a year with updated residential and business phone numbers, including ads for the businesses.

The pages aren't yellow, though.

UK: yes, we still get sent one (along with a residential directory). It's no longer phone directory sized though. Now midway between A4 and A5 sized and about a centimeter thick.

Also in the UK. The last Yellow Pages we received, about two months ago, had a large ‘Final Issue‘ highlight on the front. They’ve finally given up. I tried to dredge up some nostalgic feelings for it’s demise, but flicking through the contents I really couldn’t. About 40% of the ad space throughout the book was for one advertiser, Gas Safe Register, and I can only assume that got sold at a song to fill the space. I’d love to know the percentage of the population that are going to miss it. I can see why it’s no longer effective with search engines being what they are, but there must still be a decent number of (presumably older) people who don’t google when they need contact details.

The only nostalgia I have is for the adverts - the kids and the missletoe, fly fishing by JR Hartley, etc

Also UK: Yep - the 2018 edition will be the last printed one, apparently - then online only.

Sort of. UDDI had sought to replace yellow pages (and other colors) in the Java/SOA world of the mid 2000s. LDAP (successor to yp/nis) lost the page terminology on the way to standardization.

https://www.thestreet.com/story/14207102/1/the-yellow-pages-...

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