Editing ETA Systems (section)

==Naming the Firm==
Neil Lincoln, chief architect, asserts that ETA is not an acronym, and otherwise means nothing, not even the well known acronym of "estimated time of arrival." In point of fact, he says that he would not have named the firm that so as to dissociate it from, [[ETA (separatist group)|ETA]], the Basque separatist group, or the ''[[Burakumin|Eta]]'', the Japanese social minority (especially as Japan was considered a market). According to one of the CPU designers at ETA, Neil told a story that his sons actually came up with the name: apparently a [[linotype machine]] has characters arranged in the [[Letter frequency#Relative frequencies of letters in the English language|order of frequency]] used in the English language and the first three letters were used. {{Citation needed|date=December 2021}}

Another theory asserts the name was chosen based on the frequency of English alphabet letters due in part to the then current popularity of [[Douglas Hofstadter]]'s 1980 book [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] which used ETAOIN, etc., to capitalize on popularity and current hip-ness.

A third, completely plausible theory, is that ETA was a successor name to the much earlier [[Engineering Research Associates]] ERA: Engineering Technology Associates. Norris and others have denied this.