RE: Trademarks, random strings, sharing, reserved words

["Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com>]

On Wed, 25 Dec 1996, Robert Frank wrote:

> Date: Wed, 25 Dec 1996 12:20:23 -0500
> From: Robert Frank <bobf@corsearch.com>
> 
> OK, let's try another.  As I have heard the story, when Standard Oil
> was being broken up they needed to come up with a new name for
> one of the divisions (Maybe it was Standard Oil of NJ or Standard Oil
> of Ohio, but that doesn't matter.)  Anyhow, as I have heard, they
> realized the XX was not a part of any name or word in any language.

XX is a normally occuring digraph in Maltese.

> So they had a computer generate thousands of names with a 
> XX in them.  The one that won was EXXON.  So here we have an
> instance where a random letter combination became a name.
> 
> ...

Donald
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