There is a keynote I can still replay in my head almost twenty years later.
On 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto the Macworld stage in San Francisco. He did not say “smartphone.” He said he was bringing three devices at once: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. Then he paused, just long enough, before adding that these were not three devices at all: they were one. The room erupted, because everyone in it understood that something had just started.
I was sitting in front of a monitor, watching the recording, completely absorbed. I liked the way Steve metered out the tension, the way the pauses landed exactly where they had to, the way you could tell he knew he was making history. But what actually made me smile was not the presentation. It was the name. iPhone. i-phone.
That smile was not only about the wordplay. By then I had been itoth for a year, and the “i” prefix suddenly felt oddly familiar.
The real origin of it is far more mundane. I started out as a software developer at a fintech company in 2006, and when I was issued my first work account, the sysadmins followed a simple rule: first initial, plus surname, no accents. That is how István Tóth became itoth. There was nothing behind it, just an Active Directory convention.
Then, barely a year later, the iPhone arrived, and for a moment I let myself believe we had something in common: the same “i” prefix as the most important product in the world at the time. I knew it was only a joke I was telling myself. But it felt good. A name born from an admin rule suddenly seemed a little more interesting.
From there it spread on its own: first an internal account name, then an email address, then a LinkedIn handle.
Most of what we say about ourselves takes its shape and its meaning in hindsight. It does not happen at the moment we name something. It happens much later, when we look back and work out what it actually meant.
That is why I am not here to hand out advice. I am here to tell stories: situations and experiences, with my own opinion mixed in. That, I think, is how something really sticks, not as a rule or a checklist, but as a story, the way Steve told a story on that January day.
It is also why I did not go looking for a flashier name when this site needed one. itoth.hu is not the result of a remarkable story. It is the result of the absence of one: a sysadmin rule handed it to me, and I gave it meaning years later. Steve was obsessed with simplicity, with stripping away everything that is not necessary until only the essential remains. Perhaps that is why a plain, self-assembled name still feels like the right one to carry.
That is how I became itoth. A rule gave me the name. Twenty years gave it meaning.
If you have a name story of your own that only found its meaning later, tell me about it on LinkedIn.
