if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name
by 5 O'clock.

CISCO

It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is
short for San Fran
cisco.

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'

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 webpages. 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'. Kapor 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 4 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