> I've also heard a rumor that at least part of the convention was due to th
e MAE
> being called Metropolitan Area Ethernet which was, again, I believe coined
by
> Andrew Partan of UUNET.
I had thought that MAE was the acronym MFS used to descibe the service
which provided a virtual ethernet over the MFS fiber infrastructure.
I think I told John Hardie a couple years back (when MAE-East) went
to FDDI) that we could still use MAE as Metro Area Exchange.
I guess the "A" could also stand for ATM 
Jeff