Products have been regularly given code names before their introduction
since the dawn of the commercial PC industry, and it is especially
commonplace at Apple. When the Apple
III was being designed by a comittee of people, team members
needed something to call the project during development. The project
was thus named "Sarah" after the daughter of then chief
engineer Wendell Sander (thus starting a long line of computers
code named after daughters of Apple employees). From then on,
Apple gave code names to virtually every product before it was
released. Some code names were so influential that they remained
as the product's official (or common) name. These include the
Lisa, Macintosh, Pippin, and Newton. The whole practice of code
names has become so commonplace for the general public, that Apple
now assigns each projct an internal and external code name
for each product it develops. For example, everybody knew Copland
was code name for the ill-fated original Mac
OS 8, but did you know what its internal code name was? Well,
I decided to compile all the Apple and third-party code names
I could find in books, magazines, and web sites and list them
in this neat interface you see before you. There are a few names
I'm not sure of (very little), but those are marked with a "?"
at the end of them. If you have any code-names not mentioned below,
or corrections to these, please e-mail
me. Thanks.
Apple IIc: E.T. (extraterrestrial), IIb (for book-sized), IIp
(for portable), Pippin, VLC (Very Low Cost), Elf, Yoda, Teddy
(short for Testing Every Day), Chels, Jason, Lollie, Sherry,
Zelda (the children of team members)
Apple IIc+: Adam Ant (because the team was adamant about keeping
the project alive), Pizza (because of its boxy shape), Propeller
(because a team member had a propeller beanie in his office),
Raisin (after testers won 2nd place for their California Raisins
costumes in an Apple Halloween party)
Apple IIgs: Cortland, Phoenix (the project had been brought
back to life after being killed), Rambo (when design team was
fighting for final approval from the executive staff), Gumby
(from an impersonation done at an Apple Halloween parade) Mark
Twain (abandoned ROM04 prototype)
Apple IIx: Dove, Brooklyn, Golden Gate (referring
to the ability to make it a bridge between the Apple II and Mac)
Apple Lisa: Lisa was the orginal code-name, supposedly named
after Steve Jobs' daughter Lisa Nicole.
Mac II: Little Big Mac, Milwaukee (engineer Mike Dhuey's
hometown), Ikki (Turkish for "2", also means "bottoms
up" in Japanese), Cabernet, Reno (in honor of the slots),
Becks, Paris (homage to Jean-Louis Gassée), Uzi
Mac IIci: Aurora II, Cobra II, Pacific, Stingray
Mac IIcx: Aurora, Cobra, Atlantic (aborted
16-MHz configuration)
Mac IIfx: Stealth, Blackbird, F-16, F-19,
Four Square, IIxi, Zone 5, Weed-Whacker
Mac IIsi: Oceanic, Ray Ban (as in "the
future's so bright, you gotta wear shades"; it shipped to
developers with sunglasses), Erickson, Raffica, Raffika
Mac IIvx: Brazil
Mac IIx: Spock, Stratos
Mac Classic
Macintosh
Classic: XO (abbreviation for Executive
Officer in the armed forces)
Mac Classic II: Montana, Apollo
Mac Color Classic: Slice
Mac LC
Mac LC: Pinball (low-slung case design kinda looks like
a pinball machine I guess), Elsie (say L-C), Prism
Mac LC II: Foster Farms
Mac LC III: Vail, Elsie III (say L-C-3)
Mac LC 475: Primus
Mac LC 550: Hook 33 (ran at 33 MHz)
Mac LC 575: Optimus
Mac LC 630: Show & Tell (probably because
of its AV and speech capabilities), Crusader
Quadra 700: Shadow (shadow of 900), Spike
(going to spike the NeXTStation), IIce, Evo 200
Quadra 800: Fridge, Wombat 33
Quadra 840av: Quadra 1000, Cyclone
Quadra 900: Darwin, Eclipse (going to eclipse
the NeXTStation), IIex, Premise 500
Quadra 950: Amazon, Zydeco
Quadra 605: Aladdin, ELB (extremely low budget),
Primus
Performa
Performa 200: Lady Kenmore
Performa 47x: Aladdin
Performa 550: Hook
Performa 600: Brazil 32, Macintosh IIvm (this
was the originally planned name, but consumer testing showed
users thought "vm" stood for "virtual memory"
a feature not available at the time, so the model was changed
to Performa 600)
Performa 630: Show & Tell
Performa 5200: Bongo, Rebound, Transformer
Performa 6300-6360: Crusader, Elixir
Performa 6400: Instatower (first Performa
to use mini-tower casing)
Mac Portable/PowerBook
Macintosh
Portable: Laguna, Riveria, Malibu,
Esprit, Guiness. Backlit configuration:
Aruba, Love Shack, Mulligan
PowerBook 140: Tim LC (low cost), Tim Lite,
Leary, Replacements
PowerBook 150: JeDI (the capital J, D, and
I standing for "just did it"...subtly referring to
certain sexual abilities of the team)
PowerBook 145: Colt 45
PowerBook 145B: Pikes Peak
PowerBook 160: Brooks
PowerBook 165: Dart LC
PowerBook 165c: Monet
PowerBook 170: Road Warrior, Tim
PowerBook 180: Converse, Dartanian
PowerBook 180c: Hokusai (after the Japanese
carver Kasushika Hokusai, famous for "The Great Wave"
woodblock)
PowerBook 190/190c: Omega
PowerBook 520/520c: Blackbird LC (low cost)
PowerBook 540: Blackbird, SR-71 (the SR-71
Blackbird shared the same slick black color), Spruce Goose (really
heavy)
PowerBook 1400c: Epic
PowerBook 2400c: Comet, Nautilus, Mighty
Cat (only for suped up configuration)
PowerBook 3400c: Hooper
PowerBook 3500: Kanga (possibly after the
motherboard configuration of the same name?)
PowerBook 5300: M2 (the model of a mountain
bike from Specialized Bicycles)
PowerBook G3: Wall Street
PowerBook G3/350-400: Main Street
PowerBook Duo
PB Duo 210/230: DBLite (the lightweight machine
was named one night in a club called Das Boot), BOB W (Best Of
Both Worlds, it's a lapop that's also a desktop when inserted
in a DuoDock/II), Cinnamon (name given out to developers by Developer
Technical Support)
PB Duo 250: Ansel (after the famous black
& white photographer, Ansel Adams, also in a Think Different
ad)
PB Duo 270c: Escher (after the famous black
& white artist, M.C. Escher, one of my favorites)
PB Duo 280c: Yeager (after the first man
to break the sound barrier, it was the first use the speedy 68040
processor)
PowerMac LC 5420/5500: Phoenix? (these models
were charcoal black, like the charred mythical bird, Phoenix)
PowerMac 6100/60: Piltdown Man (it was the
"missing link" between the Macintosh and the higher-end
PowerPC Macs)
PowerMac 7100/66: Carl Sagan (probably from
the "billions and billions" Apple would make from the
machine), BHA (Butt Head Astronomer, referring to Carl Sagan's
opposition to the use of his name, Sagan later sued Apple), LAW
(Lawyers Are Wimps)
PowerMac 7200: Catalyst
PowerMac 7500: TNT (not the dynamite, but
"The New Tesseract". The defunct Tesseract project
was to create a high-end PPC Mac)
PowerMac 8100/80: Cold Fusion (complying
with the hoax theme of the 6100)
PowerMac 8100/110: Flagship
PowerMac 8500/120: Nitro
PowerMac 9500/120: Tsunami
PowerMac 9500/150: Autobahn
PowerMac 9500/180-200: Nevada
PowerMac 8600 and 9600: Montana, Kansas (revamped
Mach 5 versions)
Newton MessagePad 120: Gelato (because it
came in two "flavors", 1MB or 2MB versions)
Newton MessagePad 130: Dante (maybe because
of the similarities between MP130's luminescent screen technology
and Dante's "Inferno")
Newton MessagePad 2000: Q (maybe related
to the Bond character with the gadgets, the omnipotent character
in Star Trek series, or just the letter Q)
Newton OS 2.0 print-only handwriting recognizer:
Rosetta (As in the Rosetta stone, which helped decipher hieroglyphs)
Newton OS 2.0: Dante (same as MP130, maybe
because first shipped with that system)
PowerPC projects/processors
Apple's 1st RISC project: Jaguar (based on
the Motorola 88000 RISC), Tesseract (renamed after PowerPC project
began, later cancelled)
Apple's 68k-compatible RISC project: Cognac
(Named after John Hennessy, a pioneer in RISC technology), Piltdown
Man or PDM (the "missing link" between 68k Macs and
Tesseract's high-end PowerPC Mac)
PowerPC 603ev: Valiant
PowerPC 604e: Sirocco
PowerPC 604e (revamped): Mach 5
PowerPC 620: Trident
PowerPC 630: Boxer, Dino
PowerPC 740: Arthur
PowerPC 750: Typhoon
PowerPC Video and Multimedia Extensions (VMX):
AltiVec, Desktop 98
PowerPC G4: Desktop 99, Max (300+ configuration),
V'Ger (500+ MHz configuration, maybe something to do with the
omniscient character in Star Trek: The Movie)
Macintosh 21" Color Display: Vesuvio
(maybe related to the volcano that buried Pompeii in A.D. 79)
Macintosh 21" Monochrome Display: Fred,
Kong (its colossal size is reminiscent of King Kong)
Keyboards/Mice
Apple Standard Keyboard: Eastwood
Apple Keyboard II: Elmer, Dvrfer
Apple Adjustable Keyboard: Norsi
Apple Extended Keyboard: Dörfer (Ed
Colby's nickname), Saratoga (named after the aircraft carrier
because of size; prototypes had small model carriers decorated
on them)
Apple Extended Keyboard II: Elmer, Nimitz
(another aircraft carrier)
Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II: Topogigo (Europe
& Latin America's equivalent to Mickey Mouse)
Scanners / Digital Cameras
OneScanner: Half-Dome, Ping-Pong
OneScanner 600/27: Rio
Onescanner 1200/30: New Orleans
OneScanner for Windows: WinDome
QuickTake 100: Venus
Apple Drives
Apple 871 Floppy Drive: Twiggy (used in the
Lisa 1)
Apple Hard Disk 400SC: A Ts'ah (Japanese
for eagle), Eagle
Apple PowerCD: Tulip
AppleCD 600: Hollywood
AppleCD 800: Stingray
Motherboard / Case Designs
iMac: Columbus (I guess a similar motherboard
will be used for the Apple Media Player)
PowerMac G3: Gossamer
PowerMac G3 Pro: Gossamer II, Yosemite
PowerMac G3 Pro case: El Capitan (as in the
ultimate climber's challenge in Yosemite National Park, it's
a translucent blue tint)
Apple, Macintosh, Mac OS, QuickTime, Quadra,
Centris, Power Macintosh, PowerBook, and Performa are registered
trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
PowerPC is a regitered trademark of International Business Machines
Corporation. Windows and MS-DOS are registered trademarks of Microsoft
Corporation.