The Story Behind These Company Names
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 httpd daemon. The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server -– thus, the name Apache.
Apple Computers – Steve Jobs was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn’t get any better name for his new company. So one day he told to the staff: “If I’ll not get better name by 5 o’clock today, our company’s name will be anything he likes…” So at 5 o’clcok nobody come up with better name, and he was eating Apple that time… so he keep the name of the company ‘Apple Computers’.
CISCO – Its not an acronym but the short for San Francisco.
Google – The name started as a jokey 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 resented 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.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) – Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, and the winner was NOT Bill…the winner was Dave.
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 = INTEL
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.
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). Acronym for: One Real A****** Called Larry Ellison??
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.
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.
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.
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Software means collection of programs, held in the storage space of a computer in order to perform specific tasks. There are two major categories of computer software, application software (oracle, word processing) and system software (windows, red hat Linux). Majority of software companies involved in development of application software. Because people have easy access to internet, most of the companies have switched their business online by business software.
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Comment by CV »
Motorola - short for “motor Victrola”. In 1929, founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company, The Galvin Manufacturing Company, started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
Comment by Christefano »
I’m not sure where I originally heard it, but I thought Yahoo was an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle.
Intel, of course, used to be referred to as being half of intelligence when all those bad Pentium chips were discovered.
Thanks for the list!
Comment by Matt »
[Comment ID #333 Will Be Quoted Here]
Googling for “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle”, I don’t find any solid info relating that acronym to Yahoo! original name. But looking inside Wiki shows that “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle” is a backronym for Yahoo!, but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the word’s general definition.
Read: Yahoo! History at Wiki.
Comment by James »
Tech companies always have the most interesting names. I think my favorite is 780, http://www.780inc.com. 780 was the prefix for numbers used by bellsouth techs in the field to test lines (call back, kill line, read number calling from).
Comment by Ivan »
Great job.. didn’t know this
Comment by SuperDuperDude »
SQL was originally called sequel, this stood for Structured English QUEry Language, but the word English was dropped when it was decided that Asians were people too…and we all lived happily ever after – Jap-style fo realz
Comment by Arlo Gilbert »
Great blog entry, thanks for sharing. It’s always a kick learning this type of thing.
-A
Comment by Anon »
Sprint = South Pacific Railroad
Comment by pyrotechnick »
red hat comes from the fact that its neither black (hackers, crackers etc.) or white (software developers, etc.) “hat” but rather something more.
Comment by Dennis Myhand »
I have doubts about your Cisco entry. I have always heard that Frisco is short for San Francisco, and not Cisco.
Comment by joel »
I don’t think the Apple one is correct. There were no employees of Apple when Apple was named. It was just Steve and Woz.
I think it actually came from Newton (apple fell on head, documented gravity). As demonstrated in their initial logo (go google it)
Comment by alex smith »
you might want to fix the Apple Computer entry a bit…it reads like it was written by somebody with a tenuous grasp on the Queen’s English.
Comment by Jabb3rW0ckt »
>>but I thought Yahoo was an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle….
YAHOO what I read from stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
Comment by Gram »
funny stuff, even though the grammar is pathetic.
-Gram
Comment by Anders »
Google: Rather than what was written on a check, google.com was selected because googol.com was taken. It was origionally mis-spelled when typed in after the suggestion for the name was made. Google was running for quite some time on the name google.com before they took on cash from investors. Rather than talk a big game, their strategy was to prove their idea to investors by building the site and attracting users via word of mouth.
Comment by adam »
According to this wired magazine article it sands for:
“Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (Yahoo!)”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/1995.html
Comment by adam »
Ok From Yahoo’s Site in the article titled: “The History of Yahoo! – How It All Started…” sates that it is: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
Comment by Kuhnaydeein »
Okay, this isn’t accurate, especially with respect to Apple.
And Engrish, er, English.
Comment by PWills »
SAP was founded by five (not four) ex-IBM employees from Germany, and the letters stood for: Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte
Comment by web vet »
Yahoo = yet another hierarchical officious oracle — I know the founders
it referred to them being yet another web directory when there were already hundreds in 1994
Comment by chiernshirm »
Sorryr pelasw:(
Wrogn acetogy…
iwll be creaful
Comment by Bryan »
Hey I really like the article It has given me inspiration to start a fortune 100 company. Thanks.
Comment by ArTiStul mă semnez » Arhivă » The Story Behind These Company Names »
[...] and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. Posted in www-uri | [...]
Comment by Better Communication Results »
[...] The Story Behind These Company Names » BlogIsEverything.com How some famous companies got their names. I knew the Apache one, but the Adobe one was new to me. I knew the Google/Googol link, but but not how they settled on the Google name – cool! (tags: branding history trivia tech) [...]