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. 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.
