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General Forum: Society | | Reason behind the names | |
| 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.
Xerox - The Greek root "xer" means dry. The inventor, Chestor
Carlson, named his product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly
different from the then prevailing wet copying.
Sun Microsystems - Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun
is the acronym for Stanford University Network.
Sony - From the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang
used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by
four ex-IBM employees who used to work in
the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM.
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!
Oracle - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting
project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 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).
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.
Microsoft - It was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that
was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-
Soft, the '-' was removed later on.
Lotus - 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.
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.
Hewlett-Packard - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to
decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-
Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email 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
casings.
Google - The name started as a jockey 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 graduate students
Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel
investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google
Cisco - The name is not an acronym but an abbreviation of San
Francisco. The company's logo reflects its San Francisco name
heritage. It represents a stylized Golden Gate Bridge.
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.
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.
Adobe - The name came from the river Adobe Creek that ran behind
Posted by: విజయ్ At: 11, Jul 2005 7:03:30 PM IST
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