How Popular Tech Companies Got Their Names

We chose our company name (Mad Wombat Software) because it's easy to spell, easy to remember, and the domain name was available.<p>I can't tell you how many other names we had to discard because we couldn't get the domain. I now feel quite strongly that domain name squatters should go die in a fire. They made the process way more painful and distracting than it should have been.

Submitted page just has one void paragraph and then this image: <a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/namesofcompany.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/wp-content/uploads/2010/03...</a><p>Bottom of the page says "via Reddit" without linking to the actual source so this is spam, even if it is a "big site".

Maybe not a popular tech company, but a fun etymology: IBM (International Business Machines) was so named just so Thomas Watson, a former employee of NCR (National Cash Register) could one-up his old employer.<p>Also, I've read that the reason Intel wasn't named "Moore-Noyce" is because "more noise" is a bad thing in electronics. Which reminds me of a flashback scene from The Simpsons where Homer keeps rejecting baby names because he can think of all the insulting nicknames other kids on the playground will think of for them.

I had heard Apple got its name from the story about an apple hitting Newton's head, though this site doesn't mention it.<p>I also heard a, less credible, rumour that it had to do with Turing instead of Newton because the Apple logo has a bite taken out of it.

There's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to company name etymologies:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_name_etymologies" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_name_etymologie...</a><p>Neat stuff.