**Beh!nd The N@mEs**

Behind the name



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.



Xerox

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.



Sun Microsystems

Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym

for Stanford University Network.



Sony

From the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and

'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a

bright youngster.



SAP

"Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by four

ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Application s/Projects' group of IBM



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!



Oracle

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).



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.





Microsoft

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.



Lotus

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.



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.



Hewlett-Packard

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide

whether the company they founded would be called

Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.



Hotmail

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.





Google

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





Cisco

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.





Apple Computers

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.



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.



Adobe

The name came from the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.