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Thread: Ever wondered about IT Company and Software Names ???

  1. #1
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    Ever wondered about IT Company and Software Names ???

    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'
    !

    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.
    Sanjay G.
    Oracle Certified Professional 8i, 9i.

    "The degree of normality in a database is inversely proportional to that of its DBA"

  2. #2
    Join Date
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    Sanjay, That is a good and interesting read.
    -- Dilip

  3. #3
    Join Date
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    The inside joke on C++ is the "++" (C was incremented).

  4. #4
    Join Date
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    Nice info there Sanjay!

    PHP for instance was Rasmus Leerdof's Personal Home Page , later coined as Hypertext Pre Processor ,buat as PHP instead of HPP...(a recursive abbreviation)
    Last edited by Tarry; 07-23-2003 at 12:54 PM.
    Tarry Singh
    I'm a JOLE(JavaOracleLinuxEnthusiast)
    TarryBlogging
    --- Everything was meant to be---

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