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 - 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.
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.
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.
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 ******* 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.
