OffBeat Buzz

I unearthed some fascinating stories behind some of the best known companies and how they evolved into what they are today.

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company started
off by mining the material ‘corundum’ used to make sandpaper.

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

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 ApacheJakarta (project from
Apache):A project constituted by SUN and Apache to create a web
server handling servlets and JSPs. Jakarta was name of the
conference room at SUN where most of the meetings between SUN and
Apache took place.

It was the favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobbs.He
was three months late for 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.

It is not an acronym as popularly believed. Its short for San Francisco.

Derived from the coca leaves and kola nuts used as
flavoring. Coca-Cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the ‘K’ of
kola to ‘C’ to make the name look better.

This name was formed by using COMp, for computer and
PAQ to denote a small integral object.

The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr.
Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland Research Laboratory.

Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web
trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay
Technology Group. "Echo Bay" didn’t refer to the town in Nevada, "It
just sounded cool", Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited,
a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar
registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name:
eBay.com.

A species of African antelope. Founder of the GNU
project Richard Stallman liked the name because of the humor
associated with its pronunciation and was also influenced by the
children’s song ‘The GnuSong’ which is a song sung by a gnu. Also it
fitted into the recursive acronym culture with ‘GNU’s Not Unix’.

The name started as a joke boasting 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’.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to
decide whether the company they founded would be called
Hewlett-Packard or
Packard-Hewlett.

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.

Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new
company ‘MooreNoyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel
chain so
they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics. (I
always thought ot was short for ‘Intelligence’!)

Originally called Oak by creator James Gosling, from
the tree that stood outside his window, the programming team had to
look for a substitute as there was no other language with the same
name. Java was selected from a list of suggestions. It came from the
name of the coffee that the programmers drank.

Combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky and
Goldstar. Not really an acronym for "Life’s Good"!

Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his
system which he replaced by his OS. Hence the working name was Linux
(Linus’ Minix). He thought the name to be too egotistical and
planned to name it Freax(free+ freak + x).His friend Ari Lemmke
encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily
downloaded. Ari gave Linus a directory called linux on his FTP
server, as he did not like the name Freax.(Linus’ parents named him
after two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling).

This was actually financier’s daughter’s name. The
three points of the star were supposed to represent Daimler’s
ambition of universal motorization: "on land, on water and in the
air".