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Comment by ridiculous_fish | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs on how Apple got its name:

"And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple."

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The added benefit is that at the time you end up appearing very early in the phone books if you company name starts with A. Example: Atari, Amiga... Amiga was also chosen, if I remember correctly, also because it made it appear before Atari (eternal rivals...).

ASUS has a similar origin. They were supposed to be called Pegasus, but they cut off the first 3 letters to be the first on alphabetical lists (I guess they didn't notice Acer's existence).

ASUS was founded by Acer employees, so they probably were aware of Acer :D

BRB, going to found AAA Ajax Automated Alphabetical Computer Company.

We'll dba AAAAAACC.

BTW, this explains the eternal popularity of Algol, even if they do keep changing the name: C/C++/Java/C#/Fortran-90...

The first page or so of phone books actually did use to be dominated by companies with names just like that: "AAAAA Landscaping," "AAAA A Taxi," "AAA AJ Accounting," etc.

If I remember correctly, Be (the creators of BeOS) was chosen because it would be the first word of the second letter in the phone book.

Reminds me of Banana Driven Development (h/t @pcalcado) -- if you can't come up with a good name right away, name it banana or some other fruit, or generally something that's so ridiculous that you just have to find a proper name for it.

And that’s how code goes live into production with names like “fuzzy giraffe”[0] baked into it, because there wasn’t time to go back and clean it up once a decision was made.

[0] true story from an employer of mine.

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