[Ncsi-net] Eever wondered how names originated?

[SHIVARAM RAO]

Here are few!! Please go through if during free time....

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 http 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.

Apple Computers - favorite 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 - it's not an acronym 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 humor 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'.

Google - the name started as a 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 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
that 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 Lemmk 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 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.

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 that 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.


Shivarama  Rao K
Lecturer
Dept. of Library and Information Science
University of Jammu
Jammu-180006

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." -Gertude Stein


Catch all the cricket action. Download Yahoo! Score tracker-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/pipermail/ncsi-net/attachments/20030423/a3d4a88d/attachment.htm