What’s in a (Domain) name?
There comes a time in the life of a nethead when it is necessary to take stock of your email and/or domain name. When you first get online, you take what you are given and don’t think too much about the ramifications of it. My first account was with Demon, the original £10 a month provider, when I was known as ian@i-grey.demon.co.uk, but then I moved to Pipex and I became ian.grey@dial.pipex.com, although originally I was the slightly less memorable fa34 until they introduced alias names.
It eventually occurred to me that these names locked me in: if I got fed up with the provider (and we all do) then I’d have to let everyone know the new email (& all the links on Usenet would be broken). So, I chose my first real domain- delicolor.co.uk. The trouble with that was how to spell it of course, verbally people would assume it was “colour” and it is a made up name. (Of course it is, it was a trademark). This migrated to delicolor.org.uk when I returned to regular employment and I eventually picked up iangrey.org.uk when it became free. (I’m now using iangrey.org, as my otherwise excellent ISP can’t cope with regional domains).
When you get a domain (& they aren’t expensive, .org.uk is typically less than £7 for two years) you also get the email ranges that go with it, i.e. (almost anything)@domainname (unless you get done over by your ISP, of course).
A number of years back, the .name domain came out, aimed at individuals. I registered ian.grey.name (& Karen & David) but it didn’t quite do what it said on the tin, because as well as (anything)@ian.grey.name it was meant to be possible to use ian@grey.name as well. (Had it worked, I would have kept it).
I have been conscious, however, that Karen is shortly having to use karen@iangrey.org which smacks a little of nepotism, having to use my personally named domain name for her emails. So I thought- should we have a more neutral domain name, something short, snappy, easy to remember and unambiguous? So I started thinking up words and feeding them into availability searches. Zilch, nitch, nada. I could only find cryptic ones¹ or ones in backwater domains. (I had decided I wanted a .net, as .org suggests an organisation and .com suggests a company. Similarly, .biz suggests a business and .info suggests a library. .net was originally intended for ISPs only identifying inherent internet infrastructure, but ISPs started doling it out and it is now apparently regarded as the second .com.)
So, I thought, if this is such hard work for random dips into random names, there must be better ways of tracking down names? The answer is yes, of course, you can get tools to do it. So I downloaded Domain Name Pro, which gives a thirty day cut down free trial. After trying it out, I decided to set it going to see if there were any three letter domains (Each letter can be a-z, 0-9 or -(dash) with some constraints). So I set it going searching the .net and .biz domains (the limits of the trial software). When I checked back in the morning, I was surprised to find that there weren’t any available at all, diddly squit. All snaffled up.
There are some four letter ones available, but how many I don’t know as it would take days to run. I did see that ls27.net was available (LS27 is the postcode for Morley) but it wouldn’t be overly transferable if we moved house to Huddersfield, London, or Adelaide. (You never know…)
¹Anyway, if anyone is looking for a domain with a hint of technical theatre, spargepipe.net and fuflight.net are still up for grabs. Don’t all rush at once…
February 16th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
How complicated it all is.
For 20 years or more we have used an email address at the chemistry dept computer at UBC (there were no ISPs in those days and email was only at the universities, etc) surname@chem.ubc.ca Never changes, well the computer does, but not the name and the way we connect to it changed. First of all to do email from home, I wrote the email on our home computer in Wordstar and put it on a disc and the “old scientist” took it to work and sent it from his computer hardwired to the chemistry computer. This was 1985 when the first child went to graduate school in Toronto. Then we got dial-up and PC anywhere connecting to the work computer. Later on we could use dial-up to connect directly to the chem. computer, then hi speed finally. When we got hi speed cable internet some years ago I got my own email account. Hopefully this one will see me out but we still use the old email address too, well the OS uses it exclusively.
Now the home computers we have had are another story. The first one had no hard drive, you had to load the discs of the program one after another into the disc drive each time.
We’ve come a long way baby in a relatively short time.
February 17th, 2008 at 9:03 am
(Four Yorkshiremen)
JMB- Luxury. We used to dream of loading the discs of the program one after another into the disc drive each time. We used cassette tapes.
Seriously though, my first “real” computer (after the Acorns and Sinclairs of the world) was an Apple II, which I expanded to fill all seven slots and it had four 5.25″ floppy drives on it. (You needed all four to run Pascal properly without ridiculous swapping about).
Whilst at work, I got my hands dirty with punch cards and paper tape. Our 300 baud modems were the size of a large briefcase and I even had a portable microfiche reader.
My first stint in a computer department we compiled programs on an IBM mainframe but had to do them as overnight batch jobs because the bean counters had baggsys on the system during the day.