Techonomix

How Famous Companies Got Their Names?
Nike: Named for the greek goddess of
victory. The swoosh symbolises her flight.
Skype: The original concept was ‘Sky-
Peer-to-Peer’, 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.
Together 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.