The useless bits of info to see if we can make a million posts thread

[cAstAgeAr]

Pixar - Action (verb) of making pixels in Spanish. According to "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" book by Alan Deutschman, Ed Catmull and John Lassetter were looking for a sticky name and came up with "Pixer", but they thought it sounded better in Spanish: Pixar. The company was founded after Steve Jobs bought the computer graphics division from Lucasfilm for $10 million.

[cAstAgeAr]

Pontiac - Pontiac or Obwandiyag (between 1712 and 1725 – 1769), was a Native American Ottawa war leader, remembered for his participation in a struggle against British occupation of the Great Lakes region that bears his name: Pontiac's Rebellion.

[cAstAgeAr]

Starbucks - named after Starbuck, a character in Herman Melville's whaling novel, Moby-Dick.

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BMW - abbreviation of Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Factories)

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Tesco - Founder Jack Cohen, who from 1919 sold groceries in the markets of the London East End, acquired a large shipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell and made new labels by using the first three letters of the supplier's name and the first two letters of his surname forming the word "TESCO".

[cAstAgeAr]

Volkswagen - Translates into "people's car", which was a project of Ferdinand Porsche in the 1930s and 40s; to produce a car which was affordable for the masses - the "Kraft-durch-Freude-Wagen" (or "Strength-Through-Joy car", from a nazi social organization) which later became known as the "Beetle")

[cAstAgeAr]

Yahoo! - a "backronym" for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. The word Yahoo was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang selected the name because they jokingly considered themselves yahoos.

[cAstAgeAr]

SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formerly "SystemAnalyse und Programmentwicklung" (German for "System analysis and program development"), formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM.

[cAstAgeAr]

Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say `dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer' means dry.

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Mercedes - This is the first name of the daughter of Emil Jellinek, who worked for the early Daimler company around 1900.

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

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Alfa Romeo - The company was originally known as ALFA, which is an acronym meaning Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili. When Nicola Romeo bought ALFA in 1915, his surname was appended to the company name.

[cAstAgeAr]

The world's first e-mail message was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson

[cAstAgeAr]

Unsolicited email earned the name "spam" because it resembled a Monty Python skit where a chorus of Vikings drowned out other sounds by singing "spam, spam, spam."

[cAstAgeAr]

The New York Times reports that in February 2004, 62% of all e-mail was spam.