Ever Wondered How Companies Names Originated..???

Here is a list of how some of companies names have originated.Have wonderful Reading when you have free time.

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Adobe - came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind thehouse of founder John Warnock.

Apache - It got its name because its founders got started by applyingpatches to code written for NCSA's http daemon. The result was 'APAtCHy'server -- thus, the name Apache

Jakarta (project from Apache) - A project constituted by SUN andApache to create a web server handling servlets and JSPs. Jakarta wasname of the conference room at SUN where most of the meetings betweenSUN and Apache took place.

Tomcat - The servlet part of the Jakarta project. Tomcat was the codename for the JSDK 2.1 project inside SUN.

Apple Computers - favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was threemonths late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened tocall his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn'tsuggest a better name by 5 o'clock.

C - Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and calledit 'New B'. He later called it C. Earlier B was created by KenThompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named afterhis wife Bonnie)

C++ - Bjarne Stroustrup called his new language 'C with Classes' andthen 'new C'. Because of which the original C began to becalled 'old C' which was considered insulting to the C community. Atthis 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 integralobject.

Corel - from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands forCOwpland REsearch Laboratory.

GNU - a species of African antelope. Founder of the GNU projectRichard Stallman liked the name because of the humor associated withits pronunciation and was also influenced by the children's song 'TheGnu Song' which is a song sung by a gnu. Also it fitted into therecursive acronym culture with 'GNU's Not Unix'.

Google - the name started as a boast about the amount of informationthe search-engine would be able to search. It was originallynamed 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by100 zeros. After founders - Stanford grad students Sergey Brin andLarry Page presented their project to an angel investor, theyreceived a cheque made out to 'Google'!

Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via theweb from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came upwith the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of namesending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included theletters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages. Itwas initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

HP - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whetherthe company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their newcompany 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotelchain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Java - Originally called Oak by creator James Gosling, from the treethat stood outside his window, the programming team had to look for asubstitute as there was no other language with the same name. Javawas selected from a list of suggestions. It came from the name of thecoffee that the programmers drank.

LG - combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky and Goldstar.

Linux - Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his systemthat he replaced by his OS. Hence the working name was Linux (Linus'Minix). He thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to nameit Freax(free + freak + x).His friend Ari Lemmk encouraged Linus toupload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded. Ari gave Linusa directory called linux on his FTP server, as he did not like the nameFreax.(Linus' parents named him after two-time Nobel Prize winner LinusPauling)

Lotus (Notes) - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'TheLotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher ofTranscendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that wasdevoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft,the '-' was removed later on.

Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when hiscompany started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radiocompany at the time was called Victrola.

Mozilla - When Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape, created a browserto replace Mosaic (also developed by him), it was named Mozilla(Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla).The marketing guys didn't like the namehowever andit was re-christened Netscape Navigator.

ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consultingproject for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name forthe project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to giveanswers to all questions or something such). The project was designed tohelp use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The projecteventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish whatthey started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle andcreated the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for thecompany.

Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosseteam cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by hisgrandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. Themanual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readersto return his Red Hat if found by anyone !

SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4ex-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 inSanta Cruz.

Sony - from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slangused by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN - founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronymfor Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built amicrocomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy tomanufacture 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 Informationand Computing System), which was originally a joint Bell/GE/MITproject, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs wrote a simplerversion of the OS. They needed the OS to run the game Space War that wascompiled under MULTICS.It was called UNICS - UNIplexed operating andComputing System by Brian Kernighan. It was later shortened to UNIX.

Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying tosay `dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the thenprevailing 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 inappearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yangand David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

3M - Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company started off by miningthe material corundum used to make sandpaper.

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