Monday, February 8, 2010

HISTORY OF COMPANY NAMES

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.


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.


XEROX


The Greek root "xer" means dry. The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his Product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing Wet copying.


SUN MICROSYSTEMS



Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym for Stanford University Network.


SONY

From the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.


SAP


"Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by four ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Application s/Projects' group of IBM.'


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!


ORACLE


Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 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).


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.


MICROSOFT


It was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was Removed later on.


LOTUS



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.


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.


HOTMAIL



Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email 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 casings.


GOOGLE


The name started as a jockey 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 graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'.


CISCO


The name is not an acronym but an abbreviation of San Francisco. The company's logo reflects its San Francisco name heritage. It represents a stylized Golden Gate Bridge.


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.


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.


ADOBE


The name came from the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

21 comments:

Nona said...

:) thanks for the origin

Margaret Cloud said...

Wow, I really enjoyed this post and was glad to find out what was behind the names. It must of took a lot of research, very nicely done. Thank you for coming by, have a nice week.

The Double Inverted Commas said...

Knowledgeable post. By the way, your last post, house made of bottles was super!!!

Saloni Subah said...

it's a great post
---
EINDIAWEBGURU

deeps said...

thats great information indeeeeeed at a go...
thanks for sharing...

डॉ. रूपचन्द्र शास्त्री 'मयंक' said...

धन्यवाद!

BK Chowla, said...

Fantastic research work,Babli.

R. Ramesh said...

very very intersting...thanks for sharing friend..:)

Rià said...

interesting as ever!! loved the post. :)

queserasera said...

such an informative post...i luved the way they named APPLE computers....its very intresting...

Renu said...

Thank you for sharing it!..you post are like gems to be stored.

Fauziya Reyaz said...

great...i liked it

R. Ramesh said...

shukriya babli:)

Shailza Sood Dasgupta said...

Very interesting post! Loved reading it....
Keep posting :)

Patty said...

Very interesting article.

Uttama said...

it is nice post on a very nice blog.

Chandrika Shubham said...

Wow! I enjoyed reading this. Interesting as well as informative post! :)

Rajesh said...

That is very interesting.

Save our Tigers

Destiny's child... said...

That's amazing...really enjoyed this post...never knew there were such interestign tales behind company names! :)

R. Ramesh said...

hi babli:)

Jeevan said...

wow! its interesting as well as informative babli! Thanks