COMPUTER SPEAK

Ever wonder where names like Google and Hotmail come from? Here are the answers.

APPLE. What’s the favorite fruit of Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs? Apples, of course. In 1976 the new company was three months late filing an official name and Jobs just wanted to get it done. He told his colleagues that if they didn’t come up with a name he liked by five o’clock, he was naming the company Apple. They didn’t, so he did.

ADOBE. In 1982 John Warnock named this computer software giant after Adobe Creek which ran behind his house in Los Altos, California.

GOOGLE. In 1998 Sergey Brin and Larry Page were looking for money to help start their company, so they boasted to investors that their new search engine could find a googol pieces of information, which is the word for the numeral “1” followed by 100 zeroes. One investor liked their pitch, and immediately wrote a check made out to “Google.” The name stuck.

HOTMAIL. In 1995 Jack Smith came up with a program to access e-mail from anywhere in the world. His partner, Sabeer Bhatia, wanted to use the word “mail” in the program’s name and tried to find a word to go with it. He finally chose “Hotmail” because it uses the letters “html” in the word, which is the programming language used to write Web pages. It was originally written as: “HoTMaiL.”

It takes 12 drawings to make one second of motion in an animated cartoon.

HP. When Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded their electronics company in 1939, they tossed a coin to decide whether it would be called Packard-Hewlett or Hewlett-Packard. Bill won.

JAVA. Originally James Gosling called his programming language “Oak,” after a tree that stood outside his window. But someone was already using that name, so in 1992 his programming team picked “Java,” after their favorite drink—coffee.

MICROSOFT. In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a company dedicated to building microcomputer software. Gates took the first half of each word and named the company Micro-Soft. He later dropped the hyphen between the two words.

MOTOROLA. Today Motorola makes microchips, but back in the 1930s, Paul Galvin’s company made car radios. Victrola was the most popular manufacturer of phonographs, so Galvin added motor to the ola and came up with “Motorola” as a way of saying “sound in motion.”

YAHOO! Author Jonathan Swift first used the word yahoo over 250 years ago in his famous book, Gulliver’s Travels. It means a person who is rude and repulsive in appearance and action. In 1994 Jerry Yang and David Filo chose that name for their popular Internet gateway because they considered themselves to be major yahoos.

Longest month? October, with 31 days plus an extra hour (daylight saving time).