What’s fiona? An acronym, perhaps. Functional… Internet-Oriented… Native… Application? File I/O Network Access?
No. It’s not a what but a who, and this is Fiona, her first appearance:
Fiona Hackworth had been wandering through the Royal Ecological Conservatory bracketed by her parents, who hoped that in this way they could keep mud and vegetable debris off her skirts.
A young woman.
A character in The Diamond Age, a science fiction novel written by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992.
A novel set in the medium-flung future, with a plot that hinges on the theft of a kind of super-book.
A super-book that is engrossing, interactive, networked; with pages that change before your eyes; that knows more or less everything. (Again: 1992.)
A science-fictional object that served as the lodestone for Amazon’s efforts, in the early 2000s, to develop an e-reader. In his chronicle of the company, Brad Stone writes: “The early [Kindle] engineers thought of the fictitious textbook in the novel as a template for what they were creating.”
From all this, a codename, Fiona, beloved by those engineers but eventually overwritten by the device’s go-to-market moniker in all places but one.
That URL.