FAQ Friday

To give you a little bit of the backstory, I actually went deep, deep, deep into my DMs with my co-founders to try to figure out where did the name come from.

I remember I suggested the name, but I wasn’t sure what other names we were looking at at the time. And I had completely forgotten that prior to coming up with the name of Oxide I had polled my kids for some names. My 6-year-old daughter, she’s now 13, suggested UpDowN.

No idea on that one. My then 11-year-old, now 17, suggested, he was on a mythology kick at the time, suggested Artemis, Athena, some other kind of Greek mythology stuff. All great names, classic names, all ones for the reject pile. And then my then 14-year-old, now 20-year-old, suggested the Michael Scott Paper Company, which you just gotta tip the hat to, the teenagers just unleashing their usual cynical suggestions.

The name Oxide came up a couple days later and as I said in my DM where I suggested it, I apologized for it. I actually suggested Oxide Systems. We are of course, the Oxide Computer Company. I apologized for it and said, I’m sorry, I’m just on such a Rust high right now.

So yes, for those of you who are wondering, Oxide very much does come from the fact that we use Rust. We knew we were gonna use Rust for lots of stuff in Oxide, became very bullish on Rust before we actually knew exactly what we were gonna go do. And the name Oxide very much does come from our use of Rust; iron oxide being another name for Rust.

We also love Oxide because of its connotations of foundation - the Earth’s mantle is mainly oxides. Silicon is found in nature in its oxide, silicon dioxide. Silicon, of course, being the foundation for all compute.

I would also say that we are the Oxide Computer Company, that’s also very important. No pivots to a software-only company in this one.

And actually a little interesting fact for you, something you didn’t ask for on FAQ Friday, Digital Equipment Corporation wanted to call themselves the Digital Computer Company. But when they were starting in the fifties, their venture capitalists thought it was too late to have another computer company because IBM and RCA were gonna be the only computer companies that ever existed.

So they became Digital Equipment Corporation - DEC even though they wanted to be a computer company.

When we started the company in 2019, we are Oxide Computer Company. Not UpDowN, not Michael Scott Paper Company, Oxide Computer Company - says it right there on the tin. Thank you very much. See you next time.