Do You Know ...How These Names Came
About?!?!?
Adobe - came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind
the house of
founder John Warnock.
Apache - It got its name because its founders got started by
applying
patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was
'A PAtCHy'
server -- thus, the name Apache
Jakarta (project from Apache) - A project constituted by SUN
and Apache to
create a webserver handling servlets and JSPs. Jakarta was name
of the
conference room at SUN where most of the meetings between SUN
and Apache
took place.
Tomcat - The servlet part of the Jakarta project. Tomcat was
the code-name
for the JSDK 2.1 project inside SUN.
Apple Computers - favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was
three
months late in filing a name for the business, and he
threatened to call his
company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest
a better name
by 5 o'clock.
C - Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and
called it 'New
B'. He later called it C. Earlier B was created by Ken Thompson
as a
revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife
Bonnie)
C++ - Bjarne Stroustrup called his new language 'C with
Classes' and then
new C'. Because of which the original C began to be called 'old
C' which was
considered insulting to the C community. At this time Rick
Mascitti
suggested the name C++ as a successor to C.
CISCO - its not an acronymn but the short for San Francisco.
Compaq - using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small
integral
object.
Corel - from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands
for
COwpland REsearch Laboratory.
GNU - a species of African antelope. Founder of the GNU project
Richard
Stallman liked the name because of the humour associated with
its
pronuniciation and was also influenced by the children's song
'The Gnu Song'
which is a song sung by a gnu. Also it fitted into the
recursive acronym
culture with 'GNU's Not Unix'.
Google - the name started as a jokey boast about the amount of
information
the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally
named 'Googol',
a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.
After founders
- Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented
their project
to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'
!
HCL - Hindustan Computers Ltd. started by Shiv Nadar.
Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail
via the web
from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came
up with the
business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names
ending in
mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the
letters "html" -
the programming language used to write web pages. It was
initially referred
to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
HP - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide
whether the
company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or
Packard-Hewlett.
Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new
company 'Moore
Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so
they had to
settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Java - Originally called Oak by creator James Gosling, from the
tree that
stood outside his window, the programming team had to look for
a substitute
as there was another language with the same name. Java was
selected from a
list of suggestions. It came from the name of the coffee that
the
programmers drank.
LG - combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky and
Goldstar.
Linux - Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his
system which he
replaced by his OS. Hence the working name was Linux (Linus'
Minix). He
thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to name it
Freax(free +
freak + x). His friend Ari Lemmke encouraged Linus to upload it
to a network
so it could be easily downloaded. Ari gave Linus a directory
called linux on
his FTP server, as he did not like the name Freax.
(Linus' parents named him after two-time Nobel Prize winner
Linus Pauling)
Lotus (Notes) - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from
'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher
of
Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
.
Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that
was devoted
to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft,
the '-' was
removed later on.
Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his
company
started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio
company at the time
was called Victrola.
Mozilla - When Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape, created a
broswer to
replace Mosaic (also developed by him), it was named Mozilla
(Mosaic-Killer,
Godzilla). The marketing guys didn't like the name however and
it was
re-christened Netscape Navigator.
ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a
consulting project
for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for
the project was
called Oracle(the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to
all
questions or something such). The project was designed to help
use the newly
written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated
but Larry
and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the
world. They
kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they
kept the same
name for the company.
Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell
lacrosse team
cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his
grandfather. He
lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the
beta version
of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat
if found by
anyone !
SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing",
formed by 4
ex-IBM employees who used to work in the
'Systems/Applications/Projects'
group of IBM.
SCO (UNIX) - from Santa Cruz Operation. The company's office
was in Santa
Cruz.
Sony - from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a
slang used
by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
SUN - founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the
acronym for
Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a
microcomputer;
Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture
computers based
on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the
computer.
UNIX - When Bell Labs pulled out of MULTICS (MULTiplexed
Information and
Computing System), which was originally a joint Bell/GE/MIT
project, Ken
Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs wrote a simpler
version of the OS.
They needed the OS to run the game Space War which was compiled
under
MULTICS. It was called UNICS - UNIplexed operating and
Computing System by
Brian Kernighan. It was later shortened to UNIX.
Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying
to say dry'
(as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then
prevailing wet
copying). The Greek root `xer' means dry.
Yahoo! - the word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in
his book
Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in
appearance
and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and
David Filo
selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
3M - Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company started off by
mining the
material corundum used to make sandpaper.