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Yahoo!
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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.
The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." (Source: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html) |
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Xerox
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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.
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Sun Microsystems
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Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym
for Stanford University Network. |
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Sony
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From the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang
used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
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Sony
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"Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by
four ex-IBM employees who used to work in the
'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM.
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Red Hat
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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! |
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Oracle
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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).
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Motorola
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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. |
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Microsoft
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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.
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Lotus
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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. |
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Intel
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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.
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Hewlett-Packard
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Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether
the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or
Packard-Hewlett. |
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Hotmail
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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.
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Google
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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
Hear it from Google Founders themselves Play
Source: The
Lost Tapes
“Ince: How
did you get the name Google?
Brin: We were
thinking about very large numbers ... so we came up with the term
"googol" which is the mathematical term for 10 to the hundredth
(power). The correct spelling was g-o-o-g-o-l and I'm not sure that we realized
that we had made a spelling error. But that was taken, anyway. There was
this guy who'd already registered Googol.com, and I tried to buy it from
him, but he was fond of it. So we went with Google. “
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Cisco
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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.
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Apple Computers
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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. |
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Apache
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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.
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Adobe
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The name came from the river Adobe Creek that ran
behind the house of founder John Warnock.
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