ETA Systems - Naming The Firm

Naming The Firm

Neil Lincoln, chief architect, asserts that ETA is not an acronym, and otherwise means nothing, not even the well known acronym of "estimated time of arrival." In point of fact, he says that he would not have named the firm that so as to dissociate it from, ETA, the Basque separatist group, or the Eta, the Japanese social minority (especially as Japan was considered a market), see ETA (disambiguation). According to one of the CPU designers at ETA, Neil told a story that his son actually came up with the name - apparently a linotype machine has characters arranged in the order of frequency used in the English language (etaoin / shrdlu / cmfwyp / vbgkqj / xz) - and the first 3 letters were used.

Another theory asserts the name was chosen based on the frequency of English alphabet letters due in part to the then current popularity of Douglas Hofstadter's 1980 book Gödel, Escher, Bach which used ETAOIN, etc., to capitalize on popularity and current hip-ness.

A third, completely plausible theory, is that ETA was a successor name to the much earlier Engineering Research Associates ERA: Engineering Technology Associates. Norris and others have denied this.