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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

Teledyne the name even sounds like the prototypical evil 1980s movie super corp

It was co-founded by Henry Singleton.

  After the Academy, Singleton elected to study electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and graduated in 1940, receiving both bachelor's (Sc.B.) and master's (Sc.M.) degrees in this field. During his first year there, he was a member of a three-man team that won the Putnam Prize in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, administered annually by the Mathematical Association of America. Another member of the team was Richard P. Feynman, a future Nobel Prize Laureate.

And yet, since Singleton stepped down in 1986 Teledyne has had trouble with reputation. It may be that the only time they make the news is when they've committed Fraud.

For me, the sour taste comes from one of their engineers discreetly taking photos at an interoperability test event I was helping host many years ago. The NDA was clear. They knew what they were doing.

It could be! The company was from the 60s and made a lot of electronics. *dyne names were not unusual, so a movie director in the 80s who had been a kid in the 50s and 60s would have been quite comfortable with such a name.

I think you’re spot on. Another really good example which lampshades this is Nordyne Defense Dynamics, Kwik-E-Mart’s corporate owner in The Simpsons.

Or Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems “The future begins tomorrow” from Buckaroo Banzai. Based on Yoyodyne from the Pynchon novel V.

To add to the examples of the name is the 1950s Fairey Rotodyne[1], a hybrid aircraft-helicopter-gyrocopter with jet exhausts in the tips of the rotor blades.

There is a 1954 prototype[2] at the fabulous but small Museum of Berkshire Aviation near Reading, about 30 miles west of London.

[1] http://www.hmfriends.org.uk/faireyrotodyne.htm

[2] https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/html/exhibits/gyrody...

Yes! I immediately thought of T2's Cyberdyne Systems and Alien's Weyland-Yutani.

Real question: Does anyone know the meaning of suffix "-dyne"?

“the force required to accelerate a mass of one gram at a rate of one centimetre per second squared”

Probably why a lot of aerospace companies used it in their name.

I believe stockbrokers also are interested in the kinematics of a gram.

Cocadyne Industries

Right here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyne

I feel silly reading your reply. I didn't think dyne was a standalone word!

I think it’s short for “dynamic” given the vintage of the names, like ”ola” was popular in the early decades of the 20th century, hence “Shinola” shoeshine or “Motorola” car radios.

It is also a non-SI unit, but that might be too obscure — or might motivate nerds like the teledyne founders!

“Weyland” is because they wanted to use Leyland-Toyota but we’re sure they’d be sued, so they changed the first letter. I don’t how “Toyota” became “Yutani”.

The resulting name is better than Leyland-Toyota anyway.

Wasn't it supposed to have been Leyland Honda and we got the Austin Allegro instead?

> The name is reminiscent of several real high-tech companies, including the Gyrodyne Company of America, Teledyne and Teradyne, all of which were founded a few years before Pynchon wrote The Crying of Lot 49, and Rocketdyne, an aerospace company that manufactured, among other things, propulsion systems.

> The "dyne" is the standard unit of force in the centimetre–gram–second (CGS) system of units, derived from the Greek word dynamis, meaning "power" or "force".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyodyne

Ha! I've always thought of Tessier-Ashpool every time I saw "Thyssen Krupp" brand on some piece of machinery. Eventually I found out that Krupp supported Nazi regime and used slave labor. Guess they have a fitting name for evil corporation with members of the clan behind it convicted as a criminals against humanity?

Aaaaah, good ol' TA.

Datadyne wouldn't even do something this evil, and they made a floating laptop AI to control an alien ship.

You can't make accusations like that without evidence. I asshume that you have some?

Weird, I always think of them as an innocent toothbrush manufacturer because of Teledyne Waterpik.

I wonder if they were the inspiration for Datadyne - the evil defense corp in my favorite N64 game, Perfect Dark.

Like Yoyodyne?

May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough. I am sure, in the miserable annals of the Earth, you will be duly enshrined.

> The 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension used the name Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems for a defense contractor whose corporate offices feature the sign, "The future begins tomorrow". Yoyodyne is a front for a group of red Lectroid aliens, all with the first name John, that landed in New Jersey in 1938, using the panic created by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio play as cover.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyodyne#Other_fictional_uses

I'm a big fan of Buckaroo Banzai but it seems odd that you credit BB when the linked Wikipedia article is about the original source of "Yoyodyne"

> Yoyodyne was introduced as a fictional defense contractor in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and featured prominently in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).

Btw, Lot 49 is a wonderful book and chock full of little cultural memes like Yoyodyne.

I assumed OP was probably remembering the 1984 film, and Buckaroo's Yoyodyne doesn't have its own wiki page. That is it. Plus the other uses are interesting even if trivial. Star Trek used the same exact form as the Buckaroo Bonzai film, "Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems," which probably isn't coincidence. I think that's neat, and that everyone should have the opportunity to stroke their chin and ponder this.

> Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems for a defense contractor whose corporate offices feature the sign, "The future begins tomorrow"

That’s an interesting slogan, as I’d have thought that “the future begins today” seems more innovative. The future beginning tomorrow seems a bit of a tautology and procrastination.

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