BT has an internal news website (formally an internal newspaper mailed to every employee). You know the sort of thing, heavy on the achievements of the company and the individual exploits of the senior managers. Propaganda by any other name. This august publication was (is?) titled BT Today.
BT also had an internal news server1 set up sometime in the early 90s by tech savvy employees on a bit of spare kit. Being an unofficial service, it became a place for, among other things, gently criticism of management policy. Somewhere along the line someone was referring to the internal propaganda sheet and mistyped it BT Toady. The BT was quickly dropped and the paper became known as the Toady from there on in.
1. The server was set up and run by people off the books on redundant kit, often under peoples desks. It was tolerated by management, initially because they knew nothing off it, then because we were a tech firm, and we did tech things. Over the years, management set up various competing internal social meja servers, but these mainly attracted marketing and other none technical types, while the news server continued to be the chosen meeting place of the more technical amongst us. A combination of the tightening up of PC installs and the lack of a newsreader in the SF portfolio along with the dwindelling numbers of independently minded internet pathfinders being employed saw the news server traffic reduce 1000s of posts a day down to a couple of hundred a month by the time I left.
