List of Computer Term Etymologies - T

T

• Tomcat — a web server from the Jakarta Project.

Tomcat was the code-name for the JSDK 2.1 project inside Sun. Tomcat started off as a servlet specification implementation by James Duncan Davidson who was a software architect at Sun. Davidson had initially hoped that the project would be made open-source, and since most open-source projects had O'Reilly books on them with an animal on the cover, he wanted to name the project after an animal. He came up with Tomcat since he reasoned the animal represented something that could take care of and fend for itself.

• troff — a document processing system for Unix.

Troff stands for "typesetter roff", although many people have speculated that it actually means "Times roff" because of the use of the Times font family in troff by default. Troff has its origins from Roff, an earlier formatting program, whose name is a contraction of "run off".

• Trojan horse — a malicious program that is disguised as legitimate software.

The term is derived from the classical myth of the Trojan Horse. Analogously, a Trojan horse appears innocuous (or even to be a gift), but in fact is a vehicle for bypassing security.

• Tux — The penguin now commonly regarded as the most famous logo of the Linux Kernel and its deviants.

The logo was originally created by Larry Ewing in 1996 as an entry in a Linux Logo competition. The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds was bitten by a Little Penguin during a visit to Canberra Zoo in 1993, which made the penguin his 'favourite' animal. The word Tux apparently comes from "(T)orvalds (U)ni(X)". Some people also observe that the first thing that comes to one's mind when looking at the black and white coat of the Penguin is a tuxedo.

• TWAIN — a standard for acquiring data from image scanners.

"Twain" is a dated word for "two". Although TWAIN is not an acronym, it has often been referred to as an acronym for "Technology Without An Intelligent Name".