Amiga: ahead of Apple in the phone book?

The company's first name was Hi-Toro, chosen by Larry Kaplan in 1982 ^[1], and it means "high bull" ^[5]. It did not catch on. According to Jimmy Maher, everyone Dave Morse and Jay Miner spoke to thought the name brought lawnmowers to mind ^[1]; Jeremy Reimer goes further and writes that the name already belonged to a lawnmower maker ^[2].

As for choosing the new name, there are two versions. In Maher's, it was Morse who started leafing through a dictionary looking for a word that would come before Apple and Atari in company listings. He found "amigo", which sounded good at a time when "user-friendliness" was in fashion, and then the feminine form, "amiga", which he liked even better: friendly, elegant and even a little sexy. Miner, as he later admitted, was not enthusiastic, but let it pass because the others liked it ^[1].

In the listings, what mattered was coming before Atari, the direct competitor, and not just Apple.

In Reimer's version, the roles are reversed: it was Miner who wanted a computer that was both friendly and sexy and suggested "Amiga", the Spanish word for a female friend. "Perhaps not coincidentally", he writes, it came before Atari in the phone book. And it was Miner who was not very happy with the name at first, but since nobody came up with anything better, it stuck ^[2]. Wikipedia sums up both: the creators chose the Spanish word because they knew it and because it came before Apple and Atari in alphabetical order ^[3].

In other words, alphabetical order appears in every version, but never on its own: the reason they all repeat is the friendly sound of the word ^{[1] [2] [3]}. And the detail that tends to get lost is that, in the listings, what mattered was coming before Atari, the direct competitor, and not just Apple ^{[1] [2]}.

At Amiga, the female names did not stop at the company. Morse decided that the chips would all have women's names: if anyone overheard a phone call, they would not realise it was about computer parts. The computer itself had the codename Lorraine, the name of Morse's wife ^[4]. And for Portuguese speakers there is a bonus the Californians never planned: "amiga" means exactly the same here.