3.24.2010
How 7 Popular Tech Companies Got Their Names
1. HP - Coin FlipHeads Hewlett-Packard & Tails, Packard-Hewlett. We see who won.
2. Apple: Steve Jobs likes apples.
After being 3 months late in filing for a name and trademark, Steve Jobs challenged the other founders to come up with a name better than Apple by the end of the day.
I suppose no better names were found.
3. Microsoft
MICROcomputer SOFTware. Yep, that's it.
4. Adobe
Adobe was named after Adobe Creek, a river in Los Altos, California, that ran behind the house of one of the founders, John Warnock.
5. Oracle
RDBMS was the initial project started by the founders for the CIA. The project was codenamed "Oracle" because it was supposed to be able to answer any question about anything (the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?). Although the CIA ended this project, the company ORACLE is definitely still around.
6. Sony
It was derived from sonus, the Latin word for sound, and a weird Engrish slang expression, "sonny boy", which in 1950s Japan connoted "smart, presentable young men," which is what Sony founder, Akio Morita, considered himself
7. Google
Google was named after Googol, which refers to the number 10100, or a 1 followed by a hundred zeros, which is more than the number of atoms in the universe, to symbolize the massive amounts of data that they were setting out to crawl and organize.
I love this one.
read more @ Business Insider
