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mghackerladyyesterday at 5:53 PM1 replyview on HN

Do you have any evidence it was done on purpose? The devs have referenced the unfortunate name a few times but I think it is infinitely more likely they chose the name in reference to the poor quality of the software or as a normal acronym


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lynndotpyyesterday at 6:30 PM

Yes, I cited it an above comment: https://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/

Here is the full quote:

> > Your home page says that you created GIMP to address the lack of free or inexpensive Unix graphics tools. How did you guys actually get together to tackle this? Was it like in Blues Brothers? Were you on a mission from God?

> Spencer was my brother's roommate for four years. (He's been my roommate for the past six months). So I knew who he was when we decided to take the compilers course here together. Big mistake. During one of the impossibly boring assignments we decided we wanted to do something which wouldn't suck. The idea of doing the GIMP actually fell out fairly naturally.

> It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for.