Five of us were investigating starting a company together. After a few meetings, the issue of a name came up and we arranged for a face-to-face meeting to brain

Five of us were investigating starting a company together. After a few meetings, the issue of a name came up and we arranged for a face-to-face meeting to brainstorm. I didn’t want a name like, System Administration Software Inc because what would we do if we ended up writing software for garage door openers. I suggested picking a catchy name that wouldn’t identify what we made too narrowly. Among the names I proposed that I still remember over 30 years later were Apache and Emerald City Software; someone else proposed Veritas. None of these were unanimously liked by the group. I then recalled a unique hostname used by a friend and suggested Tivoli, everyone liked it and the name is still used today. There was one wrinkle, when I went to the state’s Attorney General’s office to register the name for incorporation, I discovered that there was already a Tivoli Inc in Texas. (I didn’t realize that there was a small town in Texas by the name Tivoli.) So I tacked on another word and the company’s new name became Tivoli Systems. Out of the original group, only two of us actually started the company. We quit our jobs and went all in.