One of the world's largest software companies is named after a government codename. Its first customer was the agency that chose it.
Oracle began on June 16, 1977, in Santa Clara, California, as Software Development Laboratories. Its founders were Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. Ellison had been inspired by Edgar Codd's 1970 paper on relational databases, a new way to organize data in linked tables.
The name came from a project for the CIA. Ellison has said that "Oracle" was the codename of a CIA-funded project he worked on at Ampex, where Miner had been his boss. Wikipedia instead dates the project to 1977, the year the company was founded. By one early account, the founders flipped a coin between taking it and building a compiler. Either way, the CIA paid $48,000 for the first copy of the database. Ellison recalled that it took nine months to get the money.
That first product was called Oracle Version 2. There was no Version 1. Ellison's explanation: "Who in the world would buy software called Version 1 from four guys in California?"
The company caught up with its product slowly. It became Relational Software, Inc. in 1979, Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983, and Oracle Corporation in 1995.
The codename was apt. In the ancient world an oracle was a god's answer to a human question, usually about the future, delivered through a priest or priestess. The word comes from Latin oraculum, built on ōrare, "to pray, plead or beseech." It also came to mean the place where those answers were given, and by the 1590s any uncommonly wise person. A database that answers any question put to it fits the old sense well.
Oracle's name even shaped another product's. When Borland built a tool for talking to databases in 1993, the team rejected "Oracle" as a codename. Instead they chose Delphi, on the logic that if you want to talk to the oracle, you go to Delphi.