Alice and Bob were almost Adolf and Bertholt (1977)

archive.org

Rich Schroepell response to Ron Rivest and the RSA paper included a suggestion to name the protagonists Adolf and Bertholt.

"Another literary suggestion: name your protagonists, perhaps Adolf and Bertholt or somesuch. This would reserve isolated letters for mathematical quantities."

Rivest, Shamir and Adleman liked the suggestion and eventually settled on Alice and Bob.

I gave a talk on ‘Practical Quantum Cryptography’ circa 1998 where I named them Alligator and Bear.

lmao

Nobody in the audience thought it was practical but they were a bunch of theoreticians, the funny thing about ‘fundamentals of quantum mechanics’ is that experiments always work as planned…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com