What's in a name??

I received this forward about a month ago. Some nice old pictures. Funny how some of these revolutionary technologists figured out what to name their company or technology.




Tim Berners Lee -- Founder of the World Wide Web






Bill Hewlett(L) and Dave Packard(R) of HP. Behind them in the picture is the famous HP Garage. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. And the winner was not Bill... the winner was Dave.





Larry Page(L) and Sergey Brin(R), founders of Google. Google was originally intended to be named 'Googol'. It was spelt wrongly as 'Google'. So they kept the name as GOOGLE.







Ken Thompson (L) and Dennis Ritchie(R), creators of UNIX. Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'. B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie). He later called it C.




Steve Woznaik(sitting) and Steve Jobs of APPLE Computers. He was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn't get any better name for his new company. So one day he told to the staff: "If I'll not get better name by 5 o'clcok today, our company's name will be anything he likes." So at 5 o'clock nobody came up with a nice name, and he was eating APPLE that time, so he kept the name of the company 'Apple Computers'.





Gordon Moore(L) and Bob Noyce(R), founders of 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 - > INTEL





Andreas Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla of SUN (StanfordUniversity Network) MicroSystems. Founded by four Stanford University buddies.





Linus Torvalds of Linux Operating System. He initially 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 Lemmk 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. Thus, Linus kept the name of his new OS to Linux.





Infosys - when it was just started(1981).