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No. Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker sent me an email telling us they made a BIOS web browser and our name would confuse things. Under advice from our lega

No. Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker sent me an email telling us they made a BIOS web browser and our name would confuse things. Under advice from our legal support, we agreed to change the name. We changed to Firebird and the OSS database project bombed my inbox (and Mitchell's too) for a week with hundreds of nastygrams and though we were in the clear on TM, we didn't want to stomp on the little OSS project so we changed again. I was at the whiteboard when Jason Kersey of mozBin, mozillaZine, and later Chrome fame came up with Firefox. We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.

dataf3l 2y ago
was waterduck considered?
- blackenedgem 2y ago
  Stormcow
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    Tornadocalf
- grishka 2y ago
  Technically, all real-life ducks are waterducks. Except when they're temporarily airducks.
RexM 2y ago
Did you also come up with Sharknado in this whiteboarding exercise?
amandasystems 2y ago
You had me at “BIOS web browser”
- 9point6 2y ago
  I'm assuming some kind of instant-on OS feature which if you're interested—Cathode Ray Dude on youtube has several episode series all about that weird and wonderful point of computer history
- shrikant 2y ago
  I thought Phoenix may have just made that up because they were miffed about someone in tech using their name, but no, they actually did have a "BIOS web browser"! https://web.archive.org/web/20020618092004/https://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1023929818 https://web.archive.org/web/20020618092004/https://www.xbitl...
ahartmetz 2y ago
> We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up. Nice. Now I wonder if the ~0.8? era extension "Firesomething" was directly inspired by that whiteboard. IIRC it randomly combined two components from lists.
simcop2387 2y ago
Ah neat, I didn't realize it was the bios maker that was behind that one, I thought it was the IBPhoenix product, it's been way too long since all that happened and I think it's all gotten jumbled in my memory.
guessbest 2y ago
It was Firebird. Thanks for correcting me.

dataf3l 2y ago

was waterduck considered?

blackenedgem 2y ago
Stormcow
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Tornadocalf
grishka 2y ago
Technically, all real-life ducks are waterducks. Except when they're temporarily airducks.

RexM 2y ago

Did you also come up with Sharknado in this whiteboarding exercise?

amandasystems 2y ago

You had me at “BIOS web browser”

9point6 2y ago
I'm assuming some kind of instant-on OS feature which if you're interested—Cathode Ray Dude on youtube has several episode series all about that weird and wonderful point of computer history
shrikant 2y ago
I thought Phoenix may have just made that up because they were miffed about someone in tech using their name, but no, they actually did have a "BIOS web browser"! https://web.archive.org/web/20020618092004/https://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1023929818 https://web.archive.org/web/20020618092004/https://www.xbitl...

ahartmetz 2y ago

> We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up. Nice. Now I wonder if the ~0.8? era extension "Firesomething" was directly inspired by that whiteboard. IIRC it randomly combined two components from lists.

simcop2387 2y ago

Ah neat, I didn't realize it was the bios maker that was behind that one, I thought it was the IBPhoenix product, it's been way too long since all that happened and I think it's all gotten jumbled in my memory.

guessbest 2y ago

It was Firebird. Thanks for correcting me.