Single character email addresses at Google: The new status symbol?

a@google.com, b@google.com, … How cool? I haven’t seen any company giving out such short e-mail address to their employees. It’s nothing less than a prized possession of a 2-character domain name.
Who is getting these e-mail addresses at Google? You have to be an inventor of some programming language or a computer science theorist to get one; Robert Pike has one. (Rob has a famous Unix Programming text book to his credit, one of the computer engineering bibles)
So far, b, c, e, f, g, h, i, j, k and r have been confirmed to be taken; at least, that’s what my puny little investigation has inferred, for others, I’m waiting for my new year greetings to be reciprocated.
How did I get here? Well, I was looking for some UTF-8 conversion routines when I landed onto Ken Thompson‘s page, and somehow got pushed around onto Rob’s page.
Investigative journalism? Not a bad bullet item for new year’s resolution.

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