tape to it"). A company named Yoyodyne is briefly mentioned in the HBO series Silicon Valley as a nod to the GNU General Public License. It appears to be a technology enterprise of some sort located in San Francisco. In the novel Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams, Yoyodyne is the parent company of the manufacturer of a fictional type of computer core made of liquid crystal. The 1990 film The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter used the name Yoyodyne Corp. on a spray-paint can label, wished for by the main character. Technical uses In June 1991 version 2 of the open-source license GNU General Public License used the fictional company name "Yoyodyne, Inc." as an example grantor of the license. Many technical works, such as Cricket Liu's DNS and BIND (O'Reilly), Per Cederqvist's Version Management with CVS, Jesse Vincent's RT Essentials (O'Reilly), and the GNU General Public License version 2 use Yoyodyne as a company name in their examples. The Internet domain name www.yoyodyne.com was allocated by Internet software designer TGV Inc. as a "fake" domain name for use in DNS configuration examples. Yoyodyne was an Internet-based direct marketer, founded by Seth Godin and later joined by Mark Hurst, and acquired by Yahoo! on October 12, 1998. Godin took the name from the company in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. A company named Yoyodyne LLC, based in Morristown, New Jersey, is a retailer of aftermarket motorcycle parts, including self-branded clutch accessories. See also Acme Corporation Notes Fictional companies Thomas Pynchon Yahoo! acquisitions Fictional elements introduced in 1963