historical trivia

[<tyson@ai.sri.com>]

    Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1993 14:47 EDT
    From: "William M. York" <york@parc.xerox.com>

       Date:	Tue, 27 Apr 1993 08:47:00 -0700
       From:	Scott McKay <SWM@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com>

	   Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1993 11:13 EDT
	   From: s9274@srl1.LANL.GOV

	   What is the origin of the name "Genera?" Is it the simple plural of
	   "genus," or is there more to it? Was "Genera" introduced with 6.0, or
	   was it earlier?

       The first release of Genera was 7.0.

       It is indeed the plural of "genus", but was also intended to suggest
       the notion of "generic" as in a "generic function" (rather than the
       connotation of "cheap non-name brand").  I don't remember who came up
       with the name.  Some didn't like it, some did.

    Didn't we actually buy that name from the same name consultants that
    came up with "Wheels", "Semanticue", "Frame-Up", "Firewall" and the
    rest?

Yup.

I recall suspecting said image consultants didn't quite have a grip on
reality when they confused the (then-new) adaptive hash-table system
with a spreadsheet ("They're tables, right?") and clept them
"PlanMaster."  (I think the hashtables ended up getting called
SmartStore.  Why does there have to be an embedded capital or
punctuation mark?)

There were numerous bad jokes about new names, e.g., 

Zmail                       -> FlameThrower
Tail-Recursion Optimizaiton -> SmartAss

... and so on.  There are more, but it's generally more fun to make them
up.