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What’s in a name
Its is obvious that each of us have heard the following famous names written in bold characters, Here is the detail how these names came about.
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.
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”.
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’.
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.
HP — Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
LG — Combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky and Goldstar.
Sony — From the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
3M — Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company started off by mining the material corundum used to make sandpaper
Microsoft — coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed later on.
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)
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 answer all kinds of questions). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project was eventually terminated, but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they had started. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.
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
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.
Adobe — Came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Corel — From the founder’s name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.
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.
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.
Google — the name started as a humorous 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 Brian and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’.
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