It’s time to finally address the elephant in the room – how did we end up with such a funny name? It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with, well, anything.
VDI? Nope. Remote Access? Nope. Connection Brokers? Nope.
The story of how the Leostream name came to be has been a lost piece of Leostream lore for many years now. No one seemed to quite remember how it was thought up – even some of our team members who have been with Leostream since the early days.
So, I decided to do some digging. I put on my investigative journalist hat and went and spoke to our founders. To be honest, their memories were a little fuzzy on the subject, too (2002 was nearly 20 years ago!), but here’s what they could tell me.
LEO
The first part of the name, “Leo” comes from the LEO I or “Lyons Electronic Office 1”. This was the first computer used for commercial business applications. A product of J. Lyons and Co, the LEO computer ran its first business application in 1951. Subsequent models, aptly named LEO II and LEO II, were sold by LEO Computers LTD, which eventually became part of the English Electric Company, which then passed to International Computers Limited, and ultimately (here’s a name we know!) Fujistu.
Some of the LEO Computers were still in use as late as 1981! Talk about a legacy application!
So, what does this have to do with Leostream? Well, picking LEO was a nod to both the commercial business application of the Leostream product – as well as our English heritage. Our two founders – one from London, England and the other from Johannesburg, South Africa – both Englishmen, founding a company for the purposes of the business computing, some 50 years after Lyons – LEO seemed like a perfect fit!
STREAM
If “LEO” is a nod to our English ancestry, “Stream” is a homage to our Boston roots. I’m sure you’ve heard a thing or two about that “dirty water” we hold so near and dear– The Charles River. As our two founders discussed their ideas for what would come to be the Leostream Connection Broker, they sat in little Irish pub in Waltham, Massachusetts that overlooked the Charles River.
Just as the Charles connects the Boston outskirt suburbs to the central hub of the city– so does the Leostream Connection Broker – connecting and directing remote users to the central data center hub.
And thus – Leostream is born!
Well, there you have it, the Leostream story! And, as they say “A connection broker by any other name…” That’s how that goes, right?
For more information on Leostream products, or just to chat with us more about how we came up with such a strange name, drop us a line at [email protected]