Why they are named so!!!
Once I got a mail from one of my friend regarding the origin of name of various IT companies. I went on searching for a single site which can provide me the details on history of various companies and origin of their names. But I was unable to find a single site containing this information. However I could get the full history of a particular company. I thought of creating one with the help of Wikipedia. This is something all people (especially people related to Computers) should know….
Lets check out how some of the famous companies are formed and named.
YAHOO!
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University . In April 1994, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was renamed “Yahoo!”, for which the official backronym is “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word’s general definition, which comes from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: “rude, unsophisticated and uncouth”. Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. The word Yahoo!, represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human.
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.
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 Larry Page and Sergey Brin presented their project to an angle investor, they recieved a cheque made out to ‘Google‘.
MICROSOFT
Following the launch of the Altair 8800, William Henry Gates III, (known as Bill Gates) called the creators of the new microcomputer, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system. After the demonstration, MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC. Gates left Harvard University, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where MITS was located, and founded Microsoft there. DOS (Disk Operating System) was the operating system that brought the company its first real success. On August 12, 1981.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.
Recent Comments