Why is Bluetooth called Bluetooth?
Why is Bluetooth called Bluetooth?
A quick, bullet-point snapshot of how Bluetooth, the technology that connects different devices, got named as Bluetooth.
In the mid-1990s, different companies were developing competing and non-compatible connectivity technologies.
In 1996, three big tech companies – Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia – met to plan the standardization of a technology that could support short-range connectivity.
They wanted this technology to connect different products across different industries wirelessly.
Around that time Jim Kardach from Intel was reading a book that featured a king named Harald Gormsson, who had ruled Denmark from 958 to 985.
King Harald was famous for uniting different tribes of Denmark and then adding Norway to it.
And he had earned the nickname Bluetooth because he had a dead tooth, which had gone grey/blue.
Based on this story, Jim Kardach proposed Bluetooth as a temporary code name for the technology.
He thought the code name was appropriate as they were also trying to unite PC and cellular industries with this new technology, much like how king Harald had united Denmark & Norway.
When it was time to select the real serious name, various options were evaluated.
RadioWire and PAN (Personal Area Networking) were the front runners.
PAN was an acronym for many other things and already had a huge number of results on the internet.
The research on the trademark for RadioWire couldn’t be completed in time and thus the name Bluetooth stuck and caught on fast.
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Image courtesy of Klss through Shutterstock
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