In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, the Clacks is a semaphore telegraph system — a network of towers that relay messages across the continent at the speed of light. In Going Postal, when a Clacks operator named John Dearheart dies, his fellow operators insert his name into the overhead data of the network with a special prefix:
GNU John Dearheart
The three letters stand for:
The result: John Dearheart's name would travel the Clacks forever, never logged, never deleted — kept alive in the overhead.
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."
This website is a digital Clacks. It lets you send a name into the overhead — the name of someone who has passed away and whom you wish to keep in memory. Each name is displayed as GNU [Name], rotating endlessly across the screen, carried by the network.
Unlike the original GNU protocol, which instructs the network not to log the message, this site does the opposite: it records each name so it can be displayed and remembered. The spirit is the same — keeping names alive — but logging them makes it human-friendly: you can browse, search, and share the names you care about.
This Clacks is not run by Reacher Gilt. There are no shareholders, no profit margins, and no plans to cut corners on tower maintenance. Just the overhead, as it should be.
For information about your data, see the privacy policy.