Archive for March, 2006

Netrinos

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 Michael Barr

I’m often asked where the name Netrino came from. The Netrino name and NETRINO.COM domain registration actually predated Netrino, LLC. Back then I was living with two friends and fellow engineers post-college. The three of us wanted to share one Internet pipe (dial-up, mind you, as this was 1996) into the house, then split it off from there. For whatever reason, we also wanted to host our own mailserver and webserver on the 386 Linux box that was going to serve as the gateway.

We chose the name Netrino after some brainstorming, probably because we liked the sense of “little network” and allusion to small particles called neutrinos. The name stuck, and when we moved apart I took it for my business in trade for free e-mail and webhosting for the others for as long as I continue to operate it.

After escaping a trademark infringement complaint from QNX’s Neutrino RTOS in the early days of my firm, I’ve noticed several other Netrino’s on the Internet. For example, there’s the Greek movie Netrino (1999), about which I know nothing. There’s also a British webdesign firm called Netrino.net; given their origins as an ISP, I bet they noticed the “little network” connotation too.