Story behind names – Intel, Yahoo, Microsoft

Intel

Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore are the founders of Intel. Initially they wanted to name it as “Moore Noyce” Later they found that there was another company with that name which ran a group of hotels. Therefore, they decided to look for another name.  Then they were toying with the name ‘More Noise’. They thought, for a semiconductor company this name could be a wrong name. Then for the first year they used ‘NM Electronics’ as their company name. Finally, Intel got its name as a short form of INTegreated ELectorinics.

Microsoft

Bill Gates named Microsoft from two words. Microcomputer and Software. In year 1975, Bill Gates wrote a letter to his colleague Paul Allen, he wrote as Micro-Soft. But in 1976 they registered the name Microsoft as a single name.

Yahoo

The first name of Yahoo was “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. In 1994 it changed its name to Yahoo. The name was taken from  a phrase from Jonathan Swift’s novel, Gulliver’s Travels. YAHOO is the short form of the phrase “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.  This word refers to a barbaric and uncivilized youth. The founders Jerry Yang and David Filo wanted to choose this name as they wanted themselves to be wittingly categorized thus.

Interesting facts about Computer And Internet

1. The first computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in around 1964 and was made of wood.
2. Bill Gates’ house was designed using a Macintosh computer.
3. By the year 2012 there will be approximately 17 billion devices connected to the Internet.
4. There are approximately 1.06 billion instant messaging accounts worldwide
5. MySpace has 110 million registered users.
6. The most expensive game ever developed was “ShenMue” for sega dreamcast.It costs $20 million.
7. The layout of QWERTY keyboard is 129 years old.
8. The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com.
9. Every month more than one million domain names are being registered.

Interesting factS

(1)At the beggining of 1995 there were 24 million users on the Internet, of those 17 million were based in America. The Internet has doubled in size each year since it was invented in 1988.

(2)The fastest computer in 1993, the CM-5, could perform 131 billion operations per second. With a pocket calculator this number of operations would take 41 000 years.

(3)IBM employs 220 000 people.

(4)Microsoft employs 16 140 people.

(5)Computer performance increased by about a factor of a million between 1950 and 1990.

(6)Modern Microprocessors contain as many as 10 million transisters.