>From a friend on a QLD list. Enjoy :-)<br><br>Regards Roland<br><br>----------------------<br><br>Origins of some of the most popular computer related names today<br><br>Adobe - came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the
<br>house of<br>founder John Warnock.<br><br>Apache - It got its name because its founders began by applying<br>patches to code<br>written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'A PAtCHy ' server --<br>thus, the
<br>name Apache.<br><br>Apple Computers - favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three<br>months late in<br>filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company<br>Apple Computers<br>if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.
<br><br>CISCO - its not an acronym but short for San Francisco.<br><br>Google - the name started as a jokey-boast about the amount of<br>information the<br>search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named<br>
'Googol', a word<br>for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After the<br>founders Sergey<br>Brin and Larry Page (Stanford grad students) presented their project<br>to an angel<br>investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'.
<br><br>Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mails via<br>the web from a<br>computer anywhere in the world. When Sameer Bhatia came up with the<br>business<br>plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in
<br>'mail' and finally settled<br>for hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the programming<br>language used to write<br>web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective<br>upper casing.
<br><br>HP - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the<br>company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.<br><br>Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company
<br>'Moore<br>Noyce', but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they<br>had to settle<br>for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.<br><br>Lotus (Notes) - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The
<br>LotusPosition'<br>or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental<br>Meditation (by Maharishi<br>Mahesh Yogi).<br><br>Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was<br>devoted
<br>to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was<br>removed later on.<br><br>Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company<br>started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at
<br>the time<br>was called Victrola.<br><br>ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting<br>project for<br>the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was<br>called Oracle (acronym for: One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison).
<br><br>Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse<br>team cap<br>(with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He<br>lost it<br>and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version
<br>of Red<br>Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by<br>anyone!<br><br>SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4<br>ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/
<br>Projects".<br><br>SUN - founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for<br>Stanford University Network.<br><br>Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to<br>say 'dry'
<br>(as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet<br>copying). The Greek root 'xer' means dry.<br><br>Yahoo! - the word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book<br>'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in
<br>appearance<br>and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David<br>Filo<br>selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.<br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
<br><a href="http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au">http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au</a><br><br>"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead