I thought that it was bad that someone named an operating system UNIX, which sounds like EUNUCHS.
But you have to be masochistic to name your Geographic Indformation Service GODOT. It isn’t even an acronym!
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/journals/debu/GuntherR93.html
The jokes just write themselves.
By the way, looking through Google Scholar, I find that there are quite a few papers authored by people named “Godot”. I’m surprised the journals ever received them…
I used to work at a company that sold/supported library software. One of the products they had was cataloging software whose full title was “Cataloger’s Workstation.”
It was abbreviated CatWS on its splash screen, in the manuals and other documentation and everyone always pronounced it “cat wizz.”
And no one ever commented on the fact that we always seemed to be talking about cat urine.
Micro-Soft is pretty much in the same league, too… *
You mean like:
Q. Why are there so few UNIX systems out there?
A. Because Eunuchs can’t multiply…
Or
The first terminal program I ever used (under CP/M, eesh) was called “ASCOM.”
Sometimes I still invoke it when I bark my shin, etc.
Back when this whole inter-network fad was gearing up in Japan (1996-7), Matsushita Electric (known in the US as Panasonic) decided to start their own portal site, a la Yahoo. They had everything ready, and spent a large sum of money to buy the rights to a well-known cartoon character to use as their mascot.
They chose Woody Woodpecker. Not a problem in itself, until they unveiled the name for their portal.
Touch Woody: The Internet Pecker
As Dave Barry is my witness, I am not making this up.
Unix was an emasculated version of MULTICS. Thus, the horrible pun.
I still like Microsoft Bob.
Yeah, I’m gonna run Bob today.
If you want to include computer hardware too, I’ve played with Wangs in the past. 
Oh, God, I used to use MULTICS at MIT!
I never realized the connection.
Not to mention all the people playing single-player games with their Wiis recently. Gripping their Wiis tightly and swinging them side to side and everything.
Microsoft Works.
That’s one of the perks of being a programmer, coining a clever name for your program, assuming that you can sneak it past the droids in management.
Bonus points for obscure references and recursive acronyms.
Too bad this wasn’t some highly-anticipated vaporware.
There’s a bit of astronomy software that scans an image and locates all the point sources. So, its basically a Source Extractor. So the bright spark who programmed it decided to call it SExtractor. And the command to invoke it?
>sex
I’ve seen at least two Unix knock-off that were call something like MachsNix. It’s auf deutch, dontcha know. :rolleyes:
I work on a system that had SEX in the acronym, until a Project Manager deleted the “e”. And it has been less fun since then … 
I work with a system called SCAT. As in animal poop. Pretty good system - really bad name.
I won’t mention the multiple times I realized why it’s called Microsoft Word and not Book, Document, Paragraph or even Sentence. :smack:
::whooosed::
Is WORD an acronym?
It’s not software, but: We once had a system admin who was somewhat of a Trekkie and he named the nodes in the network cluster after characters from ST-TNG. The file server was Picard, one node was Worf, etc.
So, us wiseass users delighted in announcing “Troi went down on me last night.”
On a slightly related note, we have an image manipulation program called ds9. Supposedly named because its predecessor was TNG…
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html
The early history of Unix, with an early video game thrown in for good measure, by the man who was there. Note that there is no actual code transfer between MULTICS and Unix, it’s simply a trick of mental association.
Wiki says,
There’s a piece of freeware that takes a raster image and blows it up onto as many pages as you want, expanding the pixels and creating four-colur-printing-style dots. Depending on how many pages you spread the image across, the dots can be quite large. It works quite well for making posters and wallpaper.
Its name? The very unfortunate “Rasterbator”. :eek:
I once documented a software package that tracked the treatments of cancer patients. The developers couldn’t come up with anything more interesting to call it than “Oncology Patient Information System,” or OPIS for short.
The acronym was the preferred term for it, usually with the emphasis on the second syllable: “o-PISS.”
Which was heard a lot when the software wasn’t working right.