Subject: NeWS speak: c(-;

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 87 15:39:30 EST

Date: Tue, 3 Feb 87 22:28:29 EST
From: Don Hopkins <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: NeWS speak: c(-;

	According to a *completely* unsubstantiated rumor, the
	Sun Product Naming Division performed a great deal of
	research to come up with a name for Sun's Network
	extensible Window System, good enough to replace its
	original name, "SunDew."  (Supposedly, the problem with
	the name "SunDew" was that the word was not in common
	enough usage.)  It was found that the phrase most often
	uttered by test subjects shown SunDew was, "Wow! Neat
	Window System!"  This was thought to be a very catchy
	slogan; however it turned out that the word "Wow" was a
	trademark of Dolby Labs.  So in a reactive flurry of
	trendy acronymization, the slogan was condensed into
	the stylishly Californian name, "NeatWS", from which it
	was eventually transmogrified to "Ne@WS", in order to
	emphasize its internetworkability.  They bounced the
	idea off the Network Gurus, who in exclamation pointed
	out that SunDew was not limited to the SMTP protocol
	alone, and that the name "Ne@WS" probably wouldn't go
	over very well with more sophisticated users who use @
	as their line kill character.  Thus it was decided to
	make the @ silent, as well as invisible, resulting in
	the name that was finally settled on: "NeWS".  However,
	once the marketing people made the realization that the
	name "NeWS" by some strange accident so splendidly
	paralleled the name "NFS", (except for the "e", but
	it's small enough that nobody would ever notice ...)
	they were so excited that they completely forgot about
	their original slogan.  But those "in the know"
	pronounce "NeWS" just as its capitalization suggests:
	"Nee-Wus", of course!

		-Don c(-;