STRANGE  & NATURAL CIRCUMSTANCES CREATED THE FAMOUS  NAMES      

MERCEDES  This  was actually the financier's daughter's  name.     ADOBE  This  came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran  behind the house of founder John  Warnock.  

APPLE  COMPUTERS It  was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was  three months late in filing a name for the business,  and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers  if his other colleagues didn't suggest a better  name by 5 O'clock that evening.  

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

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

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

GOOGLE    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'...thus  the name.  

HOTMAIL   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  uppercasing.    

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

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.  

    LOTUS  (Notes)  Mitch  Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus  Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapoor used to be a teacher  of Transcendental Meditation of  Maharishi Mahesh  Yogi.   

MICROSOFT   Coined  by Bill Gates to represent the company that was  devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally  christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later  on.  

MOTOROLA   Founder  Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company  started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular  radio company at the time was called   Victrola.      ORACLE  Larry  Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting  project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The  code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA  saw this as the system to give answers to all  questions or something such). The project was designed  to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The  project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob  decided to finish what they started and bring it to  the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the  RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the  company.  

SONY   It  originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound,  and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.  

SUN   Founded  by four  Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.  Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod  Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture  computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a  UNIX-based OS for the computer.       YAHOO!    The  word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his  book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who  is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely  human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo  selected the name because they considered themselves  yahoos.