Good piece in today’s LA Times on the joys of coming up with codenames for technology products. I don’t mind sitting in on codename discussions, but I try desperately to avoid anything to do with real product names. Those meetings are generally full of MBAs and interminable.
Anyway, as you might expect, this piece recycles the wonderfully bizarre “BHA” episode involving Carl Sagan and Apple:
In 1993, Apple managers who were unsure whether the Power MacIntosh 7100 would ever make it to market named it Sagan, after the popular but speculative astronomer Carl Sagan. When the human Sagan got wind of the mock tribute, he asked Apple to drop the name.
So Apple renamed the machine BHA, which Sagan correctly surmised was short for Butt-Head Astronomer.
Sagan sued for libel and lost.
But after Apple attorneys settled other aspects of the case, the engineers promptly changed the code name a final time — to LAW, short for Lawyers Are Wimps.
Related posts:
The article reminded me of this joke I had once seen shown below:
CIA – Computer Industry Acronyms
CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
PCMCIA: People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN: It Still Does Nothing
SCSI: System Can’t See It
MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed
DOS: Defunct Operating System
WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System
OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too
PnP: Plug and Pray
APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
IBM: I Blame Microsoft
DEC: Do Expect Cuts
MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers
CA: Constant Acquisitions
COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language
LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses
MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs
AAAAA: American Association Against Acronym Abuse.
WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW: What You See Is What You Might Get If You’re Really Really Lucky And All Goes Well.