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.
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.
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