NeWS Speak 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