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Comment by cjkaminski | Hacker News Reader

A bunch of those names sound fake, like they should be from Fallout instead of Los Alamos.

But then I remember that I know someone who worked at one of those companies.

If the "Zero Blast-N-Peen" company operating out of "Hooker Circle" with the robot logo showed up in a Fallout game, it would be criticized as too over the top - breaks the immersion too much since it's so absurd.

I wonder how many of these were essentially 1-person consulting LLC's - which meant a probably higher degree of "whimsy", "sarcasm", or "whit" when naming... (and/or a little counter-culture rebelliousness thrown in where possible)

The Dunwich Building could use some fun business cards to lighten the mood.

Most of these companies were probably a couple of guys in a garage or rented office suite. Labs buy high tech, low volume items and don't mind if it looks like a science fair experiment either. For every IBM supercomputer with some printed graphics on it, there's thousands of weird dohickies that look homemade.

“Universal Voltronics” sounds the most made-up to me. But “Nuclear Defense Research Corporation of New Mexico, Inc.” takes the cake.

I always liked "General Atomics" (though it wasn't among the cards listed). Still opertating today under that name.

If there were a Harbor Freight of nuclear techonlogy, that sounds like a name I'd expect to see.

I really appreciate the lack of flashiness that naming your company "General ____" puts out there. 20th century brought us General Electric, General Dynamics, General Motors, General Mills, General Dynamics, General Foods. The founders of those companies said "What do we call our company? Well, we make electrical things. In general. Anything electric is on the table. So let's just call it... 'General Electric.'" Today companies get names like Altria or Kenvue. Empty vessels of pure vibes to be filled with Branding Juice.

I don't think we'll ever see such sincerity in naming again. We did get General Magic in 1990, which seems kind of like a wink and a nod at that old naming trend.

SGI had a descriptive name. Bethesda Softworks is named after the city, SpaceX is short for "Space Exploration Technologies", IGN is literally a description of their site (they don't use the full name today but it's International Gaming Network). Epic Games and Tesla are less literal but still relate to their business.

The empty corporate sounding names are usually for conglomerates that need a neutral name so they don't put one of their brands over others, and B2B suppliers who need something unique for trademark purposes but don't really do the kind of marketing where they would need emotional impact.

If anything, I think General ___ is now a means of sounding established and technically advanced (implying "we're already covering everything in this area"). "General Assembly" got some visibility in the 2010s, and I've seen at least one recent YC startup use this naming pattern.

They still exist today, and provide tons of logistics to the dod. Boring stuff, like toilet paper, and then more exciting stuff too

Glad I'm not the only one, I was half expecting cards from "Aperture Science" or "Black Mesa" to show up in there.

Amusingly, the Black Mesa itself is on the road from Los Alamos to Santa Fe and Española. Fairly important site in New Mexico Pueblo history

Came here to see if anyone mentioned Fallout and I'm pleased to see someone else made the reference. I presume it is notes and texts like this that inspired the narrative designers of the Fallout series. So cool!

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