Fido was originally the name of a computer I had in the late
70's. I was working for a friend's consulting company (Microft Inc,
Falmouth MA) and we were using my computer, which was in a four foot
high rack: 18 slot chassis with 14 cards (4MHz Z80, CPU 64K memory,
bootstrap ROM card (six cards so far\dots), 8" floppy ,DC-300 tape
drive, and a BASF 6172 8-inch Winchester tape drive which was as fast
as it was unreliable. (It had a progressive and degenerative disease
we called "the whoops"; the voice-coil head positioner make the
customary chirping sounds; the BASF's favorite failure mode was to
lose track of where it's head was at (quite literally) and instead of
the familiar chirping sounds as it seeked up and down the disk, it
made a sort of whooping sound, like a falling siren, followed by a
KLUNK as the positioner hit it's backstop. You had to power it down to
reset it. Most annoying.) The rear door was a rack of fans to keep it
all cool. It was extremely large and complex, and when it ran (most of
the time) quite powerful. It ran PDOS (a rather nice CP/M-80
compatible OS) and we did "C" (BDS and Whitesmiths) and assembly work
on it.

It had so many parts\dots{} I called it a mongrel. I had taken to
calling it "Fido". Debbie took a business card, whited-out the name
and wrote in "Fido, Office Computer".

The name stuck.