The Codename of a Rose

One of the many things that I find endlessly fascinating are software product codenames. You might remember my old post about Talisker – I owe the discovery of my favorite scotch to a Microsoft codename. I was planning to put together a list of all the codenames myself, but as it is typical of me, never got around to it.

Recently I was reading “I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier” and came up upon some Microsoft codenames that I did not know about before, such as Merlin for Microsoft Encarta. The book is full of interesting MS trivia, but unfortunately I seem to have misplaced it.

I decided it was time to put together that list of codenames, but it seems like since I wrote that post a list like that was put together by somebody else. He heh. Netmeeting’s codename is “Oprah”.

Sadly enough I never worked on a project that had a codename. I did come up with some myself, but many of those were unprintable.

What Do You Want to Drink Today?

I was always fascinated (yeah, yeah, I am easily fascinated) with project code names. There are lots of interesting stories connected with project names.

For instance, in the olden times Apple code named Power Macintosh 7100 “Sagan” in honor of Dr. Carl Sagan. He sued them for the use of his name. Apple developers renamed the project “BHA”. Which everybody knew stood for “Butt-Head Astronomer”. [by the way, I don’t know what the whole “Millions and millions” thing is about. I’ve never seen the show.]

Anyhoo, when I have some free time I will try to make a huge database of software, hardware project and military campaign name database. Oh, and server names. Those are a barrel of fun.

I searched for, but never found a list of all Microsoft project names. Tahoe, Longhorn, Chicago. I can never keep those straight.

One Microsoft project name in particular taught me something. One of the Pocket PC OS versions was code named “Talisker”. I did not know what “Talisker” was. I looked it up on the web, and then decided to try it. That’s how I got introduced to single malt scotch. And Talisker is still one of my favorites. :)