What could be a nice and satisfying way of overlapping software development a.k.a. coding and space in a single phrase? For our pun loving founder the obvious choice was a whitespace character, usually called just "space", but naming a company just "Space" didn't seem intriguing enough, so we started thinking.

Since whitespace is a character, and characters must be stored in a computer by encoding them, we looked into different encodings and settled on ASCII, based on it's historical importance. Space in ASCII is 010 0000 (or 0010 0000 in extended ASCII) - binary for number 32, which is usually converted to hexadecimal number system for efficient and dense writing and easy conversion to binary (each hex digit is 4 bits). So, in hexadecimal, code for whitespace is 20 ...looks familiar?

We had the 20, then we needed a way of telling everyone that it's not just a regular old boring base-10 number. Initially, we thought HEX20, but it felt so wrong to add so much letters. And finally, since 0x is a common prefix for denoting hexadecimal numbers in most programming languages, and it has the minimal number of letters for a company name, 0x20 was forged.