Red Hat
Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!

SAP
"Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM.

SCO (UNIX)
From Santa Cruz Operation. The company's office was in Santa Cruz.

Tomcat
The servlet part of the Jakarta project. Tomcat was the code name for the JSDK 2.1 project inside SUN.

UNIX
When Bell Labs pulled out of MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing System), which was originally a joint Bell/GE/MIT project, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs wrote a simpler version of the OS. They needed the OS to run the game Space War that was compiled under MULTICS. It was called UNICS - UNIplexed operating and Computing System by Brian Kernighan. It was later shortened to UNIX.

Xerox
The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say "dry" (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer' means dry.

Interesting facts behind some of the most famous brands. There are many companies / brands / products whose names were derived from strange circumstances.

Adobe
This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

Apple Computers
It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 O'clock. As no name came by 5 O'clock, he named it Apple

CISCO
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.

Compaq
This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

Corel
The name was derived from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

Google
Google was originally called "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997. The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a check made out to 'Google'

Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included! the letters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

Hewlett Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from "The Lotus Position" or "Padmaasan". Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogee.

Mercedes
This was actually the financier's daughter's name.

Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened as Micro-Soft! , the '-' was removed later on.

Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

ORACLE
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this word as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.

Snickers
Originally introduced to the public in 1930 by Franklin and Ethel Mars, the Snickers bar was named after their family horse. When that horse died they named a candy bar after it. The original Snickers bars were sold for a nickel. Based on studies, it is the best selling candy of all time with yearly worldwide sales at $2 billion.

Sony
It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' as a slang used for it by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN
Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.

Velcro
"Velcro" is a portmanteau word combining the French words "velour" and "crochet"