Bell Labs engineers had become fond of the suffix “-istor”: Small devices known as varistors and thermistors had already become essential components in the phone system’s circuitry. “Transistor,” the memo noted, was “an abbreviated combination of the words ‘transconductance’ or ‘transfer,’ and ‘varistor.’” ... But when the ballot results came in, transistor was the clear winner.
Given the central role of communication in his new science, Wiener explained, his first thought had been to derive a name from the Greek word for “messenger.” Unfortunately, that word was angelos, which in English had long since taken on the specific meaning of “a messenger from God.” Somehow, a new science of angelics wasn’t quite what he was looking for. ... And that, Wiener felt, could be transmuted into English very nicely, as cybernetics. Selfridge and Pitts agreed that cybernetics was indeed an excellent name for the new science. And so, blissfully ignorant that he had just given later generations the means to coin an endless string of buzzwords—cyberspace, cybercash, cyberpunk, cybersex, ad infinitum—Wiener continued writing.
“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this planet,” he proclaimed at the end of his first book, in 1976. “It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.” That “soup” is human culture; the vector of transmission is language; and the spawning ground is the brain. For this bodiless replicator itself, Dawkins proposed a name. He called it the meme, and it became his most memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity.
Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’
All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks. Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world. “In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.”
During that time, the name Cadabra lived on, serving as a temporary placeholder. But in late October of 1994, Bezos pored through the A section of the dictionary and had an epiphany when he reached the word Amazon. Earth’s largest river; Earth’s largest bookstore. ... “This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away,” Bezos said.
Partly because of the huge number of pages and links involved, Page and Brin named their search engine Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It was a suggestion made by one of their Stanford officemates, Sean Anderson, and when they typed in Google to see if the domain name was available, it was. ... “I’m not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error,” Brin later said. ... It was a playful word, easy to remember, type, and turn into a verb.
His vibrating phone led him to think of the brain impulses that cause a muscle to twitch. “Twitch!” No, that would never work, he thought. So he continued flipping through the tw’s in the dictionary. ... And then, there it was. “The light chirping sound made by certain birds.” ... A verb. Twitter.
Ross: It started off as Phoenix, and we quickly encountered trademark issues. ... We renamed it Firebird, because it's the same imagery, but there was an open source database already called Firebird. So we renamed it again. At that point, it was fairly popular0though not nearly as popular as it is now0so we wanted to keep the "Fire" part of the name. We just went through Fire0anything names for a couple of months, and somebody came up with Firefox, which is actually the Chinese name for a red panda.
