n2bra
Senior Member
- Sep 28, 2011
- 100
- 13
Nike: Named for the greek goddess of
victory. The swoosh symbolises her
flight. Skype: The original concept was â
Sky-Peer-to-Peerâ, which
morphed into Skyper, then Skype. Mercedes: This was actually financier's
daughter's name. Adidas: The company name was taken
from its founder Adolf (ADI) Dassler
whose first name was shortened to the
nickname Adi. T
ogether with first three letters of his
surname it formed ADIDAS. Adobe: This came from the name of the
river Adobe Creek that ran behind the
house of founder John Warnock. Apple Computers: It was the favourite
fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three
months late for 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. CISCO: It is not an acronym as popularly
believed. It's short for San Francisco. Compaq: This name was formed by
using COMP, for computer and PAQ to
denote a small integral object. Corel: The name was derived from the
founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It
stands for COwpland Research
Laboratory. Google: The name started as a joke
boasting 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'. So, instead of returning
the cheque for correction, they decided to change the name to Google. 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 uppercasing. 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. 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. 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. Sony: It originated from the Latin word
'sonus' meaning sound and 'sonny' as
lang 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. 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 web server 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. 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
'newC'. 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. GNU: A species of African antelope.
Founder of the GNU project Richard
Stallman liked the name because of the
humour associated with its
pronunciation 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'. 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 no other 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 here
placed 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). Mozilla: When Marc Andreessen,
founder of Netscape, created a browser
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. 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. 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. SCO (UNIX): From Santa Cruz Operation.
The company's office was in Santa Cruz. 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. It was changed to 3M when
the company changed its focus to
Innovative Products.
victory. The swoosh symbolises her
flight. Skype: The original concept was â
Sky-Peer-to-Peerâ, which
morphed into Skyper, then Skype. Mercedes: This was actually financier's
daughter's name. Adidas: The company name was taken
from its founder Adolf (ADI) Dassler
whose first name was shortened to the
nickname Adi. T
ogether with first three letters of his
surname it formed ADIDAS. Adobe: This came from the name of the
river Adobe Creek that ran behind the
house of founder John Warnock. Apple Computers: It was the favourite
fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three
months late for 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. CISCO: It is not an acronym as popularly
believed. It's short for San Francisco. Compaq: This name was formed by
using COMP, for computer and PAQ to
denote a small integral object. Corel: The name was derived from the
founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It
stands for COwpland Research
Laboratory. Google: The name started as a joke
boasting 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'. So, instead of returning
the cheque for correction, they decided to change the name to Google. 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 uppercasing. 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. 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. 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. Sony: It originated from the Latin word
'sonus' meaning sound and 'sonny' as
lang 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. 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 web server 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. 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
'newC'. 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. GNU: A species of African antelope.
Founder of the GNU project Richard
Stallman liked the name because of the
humour associated with its
pronunciation 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'. 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 no other 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 here
placed 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). Mozilla: When Marc Andreessen,
founder of Netscape, created a browser
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. 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. 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. SCO (UNIX): From Santa Cruz Operation.
The company's office was in Santa Cruz. 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. It was changed to 3M when
the company changed its focus to
Innovative Products.
