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, the Basque separatist group, or the "Eta", the Japanese social minority (especially as Japan was considered a market), see Eta (disambiguation). 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 order of frequency used in the English language (etaoin / shrdlu / cmfwyp / vbgkqj / xz) - and the first 3 letters were used.