Yoyodyne

Yoyodyne is the name of several companies, both in fiction and real life.

Yoyodyne in fiction

Origin

Yoyodyne is a fictional defense contractor introduced in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and featured prominently in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Described in the latter book as "a giant of the aerospace industry", Yoyodyne was founded by World War II veteran Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz. The company has a large manufacturing plant in the fictional town of San Narciso, California.

The name is reminiscent of several real high-tech companies, including Teradyne, which was 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 centimeter-gram-second system of units (largely obsolete but still widely recognized), derived from the Greek word dynamis meaning "power" or "force."

Other uses

The name was adopted in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as the name for a defense contractor. In Buckaroo Banzai, Yoyodyne's corporate offices features the sign, "Where 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.

Numerous props in Star Trek series, such as control panels and dedication plaques, indicate that parts of Federation starships were manufactured by Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, or YPS. Often, these notices are too small to be visible on a television screen, or can only be observed by freeze-framing. The creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation were noted fans of Buckaroo Banzai and featured many references to the film in the series.

Yoyodyne is also a client of the law firm Wolfram and Hart on the TV series Angel.

The central bus station on The John Larroquette Show was constructed by Yoyodyne, one of many Pynchon references on the series.

Yoyodyne is mentioned as a company in the Los Angeles area that 'manufactures...stuff' in Tim Powers' award-winning fantasy novel Last Call.

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 use Yoyodyne as a company name in their examples. The Internet domain name yoyodyne.com was allocated by internet software designer TGV Inc. as a "fake" domain name for use in DNS configuration examples.