How Tech Companies got their Names

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Adobe - Adobe was named after the Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind the home of cofounder John Warnock.

Apple - The first slogan of this company was "Bite into an Apple", while its more famous slogan is "Think Different". Probably thinking differently, the founder, Steve Jobs, named this company "Apple Computers" while he was driving along with Steve Wozniak between Palo Alto and Los Altos. Jobs and his friends used to work on a community farm cultivating apples while he was working in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Jobs was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if his colleagues didn't suggest a better name. As you can guess, they didn't come up with anything better and the rest is history. One other theory is that Jobs named it Apple not because of his favorite fruit but because Atari was well-established when Steve started the company. So, Jobs named his company Apple to be in first place of the address books of customers (Apple comes first before Atari in alphabetical order). It was a successful marketing jig. Yet another suggestion is that it was a tribute to Apple Records, which was the music label of the Beatles.

Cisco - Even though its current headquarters is in San Jose, California, this company was founded in San Francisco, California in 1984 and took the last five letters of the name of this city for the company name. This is the reason why the company's engineers insisted on using the name in lower case as "cisco" previously rather than "Cisco" as it is now known. The company logo also has the stylized Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco.

Google - The name of this company started as a jockey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. The word "Google" is a misspelling of the word "Googol", which means a 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 and received a cheque made out to "Google". The search engine of this company was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site and rank it in the search.

Hewlett-Packard/HP - HP or Hewlett-Packard got its name from the founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, but the story of its name is nonetheless interesting. Hewlett and Packard could not agree as to whether the company should be named Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, so they decided to resolve the matter by tossing a coin. Packard won the toss and decided to name it Hewlett-Packard Company in 1939.

Hotmail - The founder of this company, Jack Smith, came up with the idea of accessing email via the web from a computer anywhere in the world without having the prevailing restrictive system of having to use the email server provided by the ISP. When the other founder, Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending with 'mail', and finally settled for Hotmail, as it included the letters "HTML", which is Hyper Text Markup Language - the programming language used to write web pages. Launched on July 4, 1996, it was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

Intel - At its inception, founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company "Moore Noyce" but discovered that this name was already trademarked by a hotel chain. Also, they felt that it didn't sound nice as the pronunciation was eerily similar to 'more noise', which is not suitable for a semiconductor company. They used the name NM Electronics for the first year before arriving at Intel, which is the acronym of INTegrated Electronics and that is how the company has been known since.

Lotus - Founder, Mitch Kapor, christened this company as Lotus, inspired by the "padmasana" or the yoga asana with a lotus position. The roots to this choice of name could be the fact that Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft - The word Microsoft is derived from the words Microcomputer and Software and it has an interesting history. Bill Gates used the word Micro-Soft in a letter he wrote to Paul Allen, the other co-founder of this company on November 29, 1975 and they later registered this company in this name on November 26, 1976. The hyphen was eventually removed and it came to be known from then on as Microsoft.

Motorola - This company started as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, manufacturing battery eliminators. Founder Paul Galvin came up with the name Motorola when this company started manufacturing radios for cars in 1930. The name is a combination of the word "motor" and "Victrola", which was a popular radio company at the time.

Oracle - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) while at Ampex Corporation. The code name for the project was called Oracle, because the CIA saw this as something like a system to give answers to all questions much like the mythical Oracles of the ancient world.

Red Hat - This Linux distro that released in 1994 has an interesting history. Marc Ewing, who created this distro had been given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. However, he lost it and despite looking for it did not find it. The information is revealed in the manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux, which had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone.

SAP - SAP is an acronym for "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing" and was formed by four ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM.

Sony - Formerly known as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., the co-founder of this company, Akio Morita realized that Americans had difficulty pronouncing this name while on a business trip to the US. He therefore tried to find a Romanized name for this company, which would be appealing to Americans and would also embody the spirit of the company. After trying out different names, they arrived at a decision to use "Sony" as the name. This word has been derived from the Latin word Sonus meaning sound, and Sonny a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster. They chose this word as this did not exist in any other language. Another theory suggests that the name was derived from the word Sun, because Japan is known as the Land of the Rising Sun and also the place of origin of this company.

Sun Microsystems - Stanford University graduate Andy Bechtolsheim designed what would become the first Unix workstation by Sun Microsystems, known as Sun 1 workstation for a project as a personal CAD workstation. The name SUN is an acronym of Stanford University Network that got stuck to the company from then on and Andy Bechtolsheim was one of the four founders.

Xerox - This company started as The Haloid Company in Rochester in 1906 when it manufactured photographic paper and equipment. It later changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958 and then dropped Haloid to become simply known as Xerox in 1961. The word Xerox has its roots in the Greek language, where "xer" means dry. Chestor Carlson, the inventor of dry copying named it thus to emphasize the fact that this process was dry and different from the prevailing wet copying method.

Yahoo! - Originally named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web", this company was renamed to Yahoo! in April 1994. Yahoo is the official backronym of "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" and it is also a word invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is rude, uncouth and unsophisticated, something which Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo considered they were.

[Elvis_Christ]

Satan Laughs As You Eternally Rot

Buzzay aye bro..... band the heid that doesn't bang!

[ManchestrMorgue]

And I always thought Bill Gates named his company after his cock...

[Elvis_Christ]

Originally Posted by ManchestrMorgue

And I always thought Bill Gates named his company after his cock...

Nah you got mixed up with the AIDS virus

[ferretchucker]

Some pretty interesting ones there. What about Nintendo?

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Akai - The word "Akai" means the colour red in Japanese. As you may already know, Japan is widely known as the 'land of the rising sun', as it is the eastern-most country and the sun rises there first. The colour red is associated with that of the rising Sun as seen in the red round at the center of the Japanese flag. Akai was therefore named so to convey that it is very much a Japanese company.

Blaupunkt - Blaupunkt literally means blue point or blue dot in German. Initially named Ideal, this company specialized in headphones, and those headphones that passed the quality test were marked with a small sticker with a blue dot. This symbol of quality was later made a trademark and the trademark was adopted as the name of the company - Blaupunkt.

Canon - Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory was the initial name of this company when it was founded by Takeshi Matarai, Goro Toshida, Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda. Their first product was Japan's first 35mm focal plane-shutter camera known as the Kwannon, which means the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy in the Japanese language. This name was twisted a bit by the company to rechristen it as Canon Inc.

Casio - Founded in April 1946, Casio was named after its founder Tadao Kashio, who was an engineer specializing in fabrication.

Compaq - Compaq is said to be derived from "Compatibility and Quality", of which the compatibility meant that these were IBM compatible.

Epson - Originally known as Daiwa Kogyo Ltd., this company was founded in 1942 by Hisao Yamazaki to manufacture watch parts in Suwa, Nagano. The name Epson has a very interesting story of its origin. This company was known as Shinshu Seiki in 1968 when it launched its first mini-printer known as EP-101, where EP meant Electronic Printer. In June 1975, the second generation of printer from this company was released and it was then when it came to be known as "Son of EP-101", which became "Son of EP", which yet again became "Epson".

Hitachi - The word Hitachi literally means sunrise in Japanese. Since Japan is known as the 'land of the rising sun', the name was adopted by the company to convey a sense of being in sync with the Japanese culture.

Lenovo - The company was originally named Legend, but they had to change it to Lenovo because it was already a registered trademark in the West. "Lenovo" is a blend of two words "Le" from Legend and "novo", which is pseudo-Latin for new.

LG - LG is a combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky (from Lak-Hui Chemical Industrial Corp, which was a plastics manufacturing company) and Goldstar (from Goldstar Co. Ltd., which was an electronics company). To be able to compete in the American market, this amalgamation of companies was named as LG in 1995, even though it has been popularly suggested by the company that it is associated with its tagline "Life's Good".

Mitsubishi - Established as a fishing firm in 1870, this company was renamed to Mitsubishi Shokao in 1873. The name Mitsubishi consists of two parts - "mitsu" meaning three and "hishi" (becoming "bishi" when the words combined) meaning water caltrop. This is also the reason why the logo of the company is shaped similar to this - three rhombus shapes with their vertices meeting at the center.

Nikon - This company was founded in 1917. The original name of this company was Nippon Kogaku Kogyo Kabushiki-gaisha meaning Japan Optical Industries Corporation. It was renamed in 1988 to Nikon Corporation after its highly successful and famous camera brand.

Nintendo - According to Nintendo's Touch! Generations website, the name "Nintendo" translated from Japanese to English means "Leave luck to Heaven". Nintendo was founded as a card company in late 1889, originally named "Nintendo Koppai". Based in Kyoto, Japan, the business produced and marketed a playing card game called Hanafuda. The handmade cards soon became popular, and Yamauchi hired assistants to mass produce cards to satisfy demand. Nintendo continues to manufacture playing cards in Japan and organizes its own contract bridge tournament called the "Nintendo Cup".

Panasonic - While this company adopted the name National in 1927, it marketed its audio equipment under the brand name PanaSonic. In May 2003, the company made Panasonic its global brand with the slogan Panasonic ideas for life. The company then slowly began the process of unifying its brands to Panasonic and by March 2004 replaced National for products and outdoor signboards completely, with the exception of those in Japan. Finally, on January 10, 2008, it was announced that it would change its name to Panasonic Corporation. The name change was approved by the shareholders on June 26, 2008.

Samsung - The word Samsung means three stars in Korean. The Samsung Group mainly consists of three main companies - Samsung Electronics, Samsung Heavy Industries and Samsung C&T. These three companies, among a host of other minor companies, are considered as the three stars of this conglomerate and that is reflected in the name of the group.

Sanyo - The word Sanyo means three oceans in Japanese. It was the vision of the founder of this company to sell their products worldwide, mainly across the three main oceans that surround Japan - Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean. It was this vision that led to this company being named Sanyo.

Seiko - Seiko is the Japanese word for exquisite, minute, or success, which reflects this company's motto.

Sharp - When this company started, their first product was an ever-sharp pencil. The company took the name Sharp from this product it manufactured. Although this pencil producing company got destroyed in the devastating Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, the company retained the name when it moved onto other businesses including electronics.

Toshiba - Toshiba is an amalgamation of two companies and there lies the root of its name. The first company was Shibaura Seisakusho, which was one of the major heavy electrical machinery manufacturer in early 20th century Japan that established Japan as a major world industrial power prior to the First World War. The second company was Tokyo Denki, which was into manufacturing electrical and consumer products. The two amalgamated in 1939 to create the new company Tokyo Shinbaura Denki, also soon coming to be known by the shorter and more convenient name Toshiba. Yet it was not until 1978 that the name Toshiba Corporation was officially adopted.

[Ferox13]

IBM is a play on the computer from 2001 :-)