List of Computer Term Etymologies - M

M

• Macintosh, Mac — a personal computer from Apple Computer.

From McIntosh, a popular type of apple. Jef Raskin, a computer scientist, is credited with this naming.

• Memoization — the process of automatically modifying functions to include caching behavior.

Coined by Donald Michie in his 1968 paper Memo Functions and Machine Learning.

• Mozilla — a web browser and successor to Netscape Communicator.

When Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla). When Netscape's Navigator source code was made open source, Mozilla was the internal name for the open source version.