Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

Fourth conference

September 6, 2002

The Intermetrics Name

FRED MARTIN When I wasn’t here earlier did the people here go over with you the logo?

ALEXANDER BROWN: No..

ED COPPS: Well, good. I'll make this a funny story although I think at the time, there was a certain amount of hair pulling. The name came from some paper that Dr. Draper had published in which he defined automation. He never was one to shirk from the big picture and he differentiated it into two parts. One was effectetics which was the muscle, the pushing the device. And the other was the infometics, which was the front end, which figured out which direction the device should be pushed. This is why it's so funny. We said, "We'll call our company Infometics," and so we hired the most expensive law firm in Boston, Ropes & Gray, and we got them to work on our terrible problem of getting our name registered and incorporated and we got the name, we got all our brochures prepared and everything. And we got Bob Weatherbee to help us create our brochures, which he did a good job and he designed them in the shape of our logo and so forth.

FRED MARTIN Which was a take-off on the keyboard.

ED COPPS: The long and the short of it is just before we rolled the press, we got a letter from the lawyer who represented Infomatics, which happened to be the company that had that name for the last 30 odd years and so our lawyer said, "Don't worry about that. I'll just write them a nasty letter and they'll back off." And he wrote this most nasty letter on Ropes & Gray stationary and they either wrote us a nasty letter or sued us, I can't remember which, but in any case we had to beat a hasty retreat to Intermatics, I think, then finally to Intermetrics which got us far enough away from Infomatics and still allowed us to maintain most of our marketing.

Failures

site last updated 02-01-2003 by Alexander Brown