The industry was interesting (bizarre) at the time in that the engineers were more or less left to run their domain. Upper management might give the overall direction of what to work on but beyond that there was not a lot of middle or lower management that could tell engineers how to do that.

This left a lot of the responsibility (and authority if you will) in the hands of engineering to accomplish what the company wanted. And so engineers chose code names. To be sure too they were not meant for (sanitized by) the PR department — they were strictly at the whim of engineering.

Engineers don't want to have to put on a "marketing hat", or get marketing to sign off on a codename (for chrissakes).

That one of those code names leaked somehow and caused bad publicity for the company — that was management's/marketing's problem, not the engineer's.

We're in a more modern era now where the balance has shifted to a much more top-down model — diminishing the broader role engineers used to have.