It's a question we've been asked many times over the years:

“What’s with the name HOBO?”

In the original 2019 article, Onset Operations Analyst Gregg Daly explained:

“HOBO is not an acronym…at least it didn’t start out that way. The owners of our company had an affinity for all things train related, so many of our early products had railroad themes: StowAway, Greenline, BoxCar, HandCar, and of course...HOBO.

Historically, "hobos" were train tagalongs, people who survived by traveling from place to place in boxcars looking for odd jobs to do along the way. They stayed hidden…in the background, as they completed tasks they were asked to do, and they performed well.

This was the idea behind naming our logger a HOBO. It works silently in the background, 24 hours a day, doing a job folks need to get done, but which they couldn’t easily or practically do by themselves.”

“Years later, we published a newsletter called Honest Observer. Someone came up with the idea: ‘Honest Observer By Onset’ as a HOBO acronym. Although clever, it's not the true origin.”

This, Daly explained, makes the name "HOBO" a "backronym."

“Today the HOBO name is to data loggers what Kleenex is to facial tissues. We’ve become an industry standard. The railroad themes are no longer in our product names…except HOBO, which will live on as long as we can help it!”

Decades later, the railroad-inspired names may be history, but HOBO is still here. What started as a memorable name became one that generations of researchers, growers, facility managers, and other monitoring professionals have come to know.