DirecTV has won what may be the first ever .so domain name arbitration case.

The case over DirecTV.so was filed with World Intellectual Property Forum by Fairwinds Partners, the group behind Coalition for Domain Name Abuse.

I’m not sure winning this domain name was worth the filing fee. .So “commercialized” itself earlier this year to little fanfare. TheDomains reported that traditionally great keyword domains like books.so sold for only $51.

.So is the country code domain name for Somalia. So it’s even more disappointing to hear that Pirates.so — the activity for which Somalia is known to most people who only watch the nightly news — sold for only $10.

Web content giant Demand Media is announcing a number of acquisitions and a renewal of its Google ad deal today. First, Demand says that it is renewing and expanding its advertising partnership with Google. Under the terms of the three year agreement, Demand will continue to monetize its properties via AdSense for Content and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

The company says Demand has extended its agreement to manage and serve ads through the DoubleClick for Publishers platform and the media company’s properties will be included in ‘premium, brand-safe channels within Google Display Network Reserve,’ according to a release.

Demand and Google haven’t had the rosiest of relationships in the past. Google issued its “Panda” update to search results earlier this year, which aimed to weed out low-quality content sites from search. It was thought that this could affect Demand content’s rank in search results. And in the company’s earnings call in May, Richard Rosenblatt told investors that changes in Google’s algorithm affected eHow’s traffic, with visits to the platform down in the past quarter.

But Demand has promised to clean up its content and is taking measures to improve the quality of the content posted on its family of sites.

Demand has also acquired online advertising and media planning company IndieClick, a company that delivers multi-platform advertising campaigns. IndieClick represents over 300 websites as their exclusive advertising sales and technology partners and focuses on the 13-35 y/o demographic. The company provides the complete outsourcing of sales, business processes and ad serving technology for media publications.

And lastly, Demand is buying social media company RSS Graffiti, which helps publishers and brand program their Facebook pages with content from websites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube and more. The startup basically simplifies and automates the posting of updates to Facebook pages. Publishers configure the application to check their websites, blogs, Twitter streams and other social platforms. The application then automatically posts the content to the publisher’s Facebook page and to the activity stream of friends and fans at scheduled intervals.

The company also reported earnings for the quarter, beating analyst expectations. Demand’s Non-GAAP revenue increased 34% to $76.6 million, from $57.3 million in Q210. And net income came in at $5.0 million, which is an increase of 43% compared with $3.5 million in Q210. Net Income per share was $0.06, up 50% compared with $0.04 in Q210.

On 2011-11-11, the domain extension .DE will celebrate its 25th birthday. On November 5, 1986, .DE was the 10th country code top-level domain to be added to the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) database. Since then, more than 14.6 million .DE domains have been registered. The domain portal domaindiscount24.com celebrates with .DE: for 25 days dd24 customers pay 25 % less than the regular dd24 price for one year registrations of .DE domains.

With more than 14.6 million registrations .DE currently has the most registrations in comparison with other country-specific top-level domains, followed by Great Britain (.UK) with around 9.7 million registered domains and the Netherlands (.NL) with 4.7 million registered domains. 25 years after the introduction of .DE, an average of 178 domains account for 1.000 German citizens. Thus, from a mathematical point of view every sixth German has his own website under .DE. Furthermore, nearly 80 percent of all .DE domain holders are private persons.

About 100,000 times per second a .DE internet address is accessed worldwide. More than 14.6 million .DE Internet addresses are currently registered and about 3,000 new ones are added every day. dd24 celebrates the anniversary and the success story of the .DE extension with a special anniversary price for. DE domains. The special price of 5.25 EUR incl. VAT is only valid for the first year of registration, with the second and subsequent years the regular price applies according to the current dd24 price list. The jubilee offer is effective from November 3 until November 27, 2011 and applies to new 1-year registrations but not to domain renewals or transfers.

On December 11, 1986, Data General corporation registered the dg.com domain name, making it 49th .com domain ever to be registered.

Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation. Their first product, the Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer. This used their own operating system, Data General RDOS (DG/RDOS), and in conjunction with programming languages like “Data General Business Basic” they provided a multi-user operating system with record locking and built-in databases far ahead of many contemporary systems. The Nova was followed by the Supernova and Eclipse product lines, all of which were used in many applications for the next two decades. The company employed an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) sales strategy to sell to third parties who incorporated Data General computers into the OEM’s specific product lines. A series of missteps in the 1980s, including missing the advance of microcomputers despite the launch of the microNOVA in 1977, and the Data General-One portable computer in 1984, led to a decline in the company’s market share. The company did continue into the 1990s, however, and was eventually acquired by EMC Corporation in 2002.

Company History

Origin, founding and early years: Nova and SuperNova

Data General (DG) was founded by several engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation who were frustrated with DEC’s management and left to form their own company. The chief founders were Edson de Castro, Henry Burkhardt III, and Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment (DEC), and Herbert Richman of Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was founded in Hudson, Massachusetts in 1968. Edson de Castro was the chief engineer in charge of the PDP-8, DEC’s line of inexpensive computers that created the minicomputer market. It was designed specifically to be used in laboratory equipment settings; as the technology improved, it was reduced in size to fit into a 19-inch rack. Many PDP-8’s still operate today, decades later. De Castro, convinced he could do one better, began work on his new 16-bit design. The result was released in 1969 as the Nova. Designed to be rack-mounted similarly to the later PDP-8 machines, it was smaller in height and ran considerably faster. Launched as “the best small computer in the world”, the Nova quickly gained a huge following, especially in scientific and educational markets, and made the company flush with cash, although Data General had to defend itself from misappropriation of its trade secrets. With the initial success of the Nova, Data General went public in the fall of 1969. The Nova, like the PDP-8, used a simple accumulator-based architecture. It lacked general registers and the stack-pointer functionality of the more advanced PDP-11, as did competing products, such as the HP 1000; compilers used hardware-based memory locations in lieu of a stack pointer.

The original Nova was soon followed by the faster SuperNova, then later by several minor versions based on the SuperNova core. The last major version, the Nova 4, was released in 1978. During this period the Nova generated 20% annual growth rates for the company, becoming a star in the business community and generating US$ 100 million in sales in 1975. In 1977, DG launched a 16-bit microcomputer called the microNOVA to poor commercial success. The Nova series plays a very important role as instruction-set inspiration to Charles P. Thacker and others at Xerox PARC during their construction of the Xerox Alto.

Late 1970s to late 1980s: crisis and a short term solution

In 1974, the Nova was supplanted by their upscale 16-bit machine, the Eclipse. Based on many of the same concepts as the Nova, it included support for virtual memory and multitasking more suitable to the small office environment. For this reason, the Eclipse was packaged differently, in a floor-standing case resembling a small refrigerator. Production problems with the Eclipse led to a rash of lawsuits in the late 1970s. Newer versions of the machine were pre-ordered by many of DG’s customers, which were never delivered. Many customers sued Data General after more than a year of waiting, charging the company with breach of contract, while others simply canceled their orders and went elsewhere. The Eclipse was originally intended to replace the Nova outright, evidenced by the fact that the Nova 3 series, released at the same time and utilizing virtually the same internal architecture as the Eclipse, was phased out the next year. Strong demand continued for the Nova series, resulting in the Nova 4, perhaps as a result of the continuing problems with the Eclipse. In 1976, Digital announced the VAX series, their first 32-bit minicomputer line, described as “super-minis”. The first products would not ship until February 1978. This coincided with the aging 16-bit products, which were coming due for replacement. Data General immediately launched their own 32-bit effort in 1976 to build what they called the “world’s best 32-bit machine”, known internally as the “Fountainhead Project”. When Digital’s VAX-11/780 was shipped in February 1978, however, Fountainhead was not yet ready to deliver a machine, due mainly to problems in project management. DG’s customers left quickly for the VAX world.

Soon afterwards, Data General launched a hyperactive 32-bit effort based on the Eclipse known as the “Eagle Project”. By late 1979, it became clear that Eagle would deliver before Fountainhead, igniting an intense turf war within the company for constantly shrinking project funds. In the meantime, customers abandoned Data General in droves, driven not only by the delivery problems with the original Eclipse (including very serious quality control and customer service problems), but also the power and versatility of Digital’s new VAX line. The Eagle Project was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine, making the MV line the best-documented computer project in recent history. The MV/8000 was a straightforward, 32-bit extension of the Nova-based Eclipse, yet still lacking a hardware stack pointer adopted by most new computers since the late 1960s. It was backwards-compatible with 16-bit Eclipse applications, used the same command-line interpreter as the 16-bit Eclipse, and achieved improved 32-bit performance over the VAX 11/780 while using fewer components.

Software

Data General developed operating systems for its hardware: DOS and RDOS for the Nova, RDOS and AOS for the 16-bit Eclipse C, M, and S lines, AOS/VS and AOS/VS II for the Eclipse MV line, and a modified version of System V Unix called DG/UX for the Eclipse MV and AViiON machines. The AOS/VS software was the most commonly used DG software product and included CLI (Command Line Interpreter) allowing for complex scripting, DUMP/LOAD, and other custom components.

Related system software also in common use at the time included such packages as X.25, Xodiac, and TCP/IP for networking, Fortran, COBOL, RPG, PL/I, C and Data General Business Basic for programming, INFOS II and DG/DBMS for databases, and the nascent relational database software DG/SQL.

Data General also offered an office automation suite named Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO), which included a mail system, a calendar, a folder-based document store, a word processor, a spreadsheet processor, and other assorted tools. All were crude by today’s standards but were revolutionary for their time. Some software development from the early 1970s is notable. PLN (created by Robert Nichols) was the host language for a number of DG products, making them easier to develop, enhance, and maintain than macro assembler equivalents. PLN smacked of a micro-subset of PL/1, in sharp contrast to other languages of the time, such as BLISS. The RPG product (shipped in 1976) incorporated a language runtime system implemented as a virtual machine which executed pre-compiled code as sequences of PLN statements and Eclipse commercial instruction routines. The latter provided microcode acceleration of arithmetic and conversion operations for a wide range of now-arcane data types such as overpunch characters. The DG Easy product, a portable application platform developed by Nichols and others from 1975 to 1979 but never marketed, had roots easily traceable back to the RPG VM created by Stephen Schleimer. Also notable were several commercial software products developed in the mid to late 1970s in conjunction with the commercial computers. These products were popular with business customers because of their screen design feature and other ease-of-use features. The first product was IDEA (Interactive Data Entry/Access) which consisted of a screen design tool (IFMT), TP Controller (IMON) and a program development language (IFPL). The second was the CS40 line of products which used COBOL and their own ISAM data manager. The COBOL variant used included an added screen section. Both of these products were a major departure from the transaction monitors of the day which did not have a screen design tool and used subroutine calls from COBOL to handle the screen. IDEA was identified by some market watchers as a precursor to fourth-generation programming languages.

The original IDEA ran on RDOS and would support up to 24 users in an RDOS Partition. Each user could use the same or a different program. Eventually IDEA ran on every commercial hardware product from the MicroNova (4 users) to the MV series under AOS/VS, the same IDEA program running all those systems. The CS40 (the first of this line) was a package system which supported four terminal users, each running a different COBOL program. These products also led to the development of a third product, TPMS (Transaction Processing Monitoring System (announced in 1980)) which could capably run a large number of COBOL or PL/I users with a smaller number of processors, a major resource and performance advantage on AOS and AOS/VS systems. TPMS had the same screen design tool as the earlier products. TPMS used defined subroutine calls for screen functions from COBOL or PL/I, which in some users’ eyes made it more difficult to use. However, this product was aimed at the professional IS Programmers as were its competitors—IBM’s CICS and DEC’s TRAX. As with IDEA, TPMS used INFOS for information management and DG/DBMS for database management.

Dasher Terminals

Data General produced a full range of peripherals, sometimes by rebadging printers for example, but Data General’s own series of CRT-based and hard-copy terminals, were high quality and featured a generous number of function keys, each with the ability to send different codes, with any combination of control and shift keys, which influenced WordPerfect design. The model 6053 Dasher 2 featured an easily tilted screen, but used many integrated circuits; the smaller, lighter D100, D200 and eventually the D210 replaced it as the basic user terminal, while graphics models such as the D460 (with ANSI X3.64 compatibility) occupied the very high end of the range. Terminal emulators for the D2/D3/D100/D200/D210 (and some features of the D450/460) do exist, including the Freeware 1993 DOS program in D460.zip.

Most Data General software was written specifically for their own terminals (or the terminal emulation built into the Desktop Generation DG10, but the Data General One built-in terminal emulator is not often suitable), although software using Data General Business BASIC could be more flexible in terminal handling, because logging into a Business BASIC system would initiate a process whereby the terminal type would (usually) be auto-detected.

Desktop Generation

Data General also brought out a small-footprint “Desktop Generation” range, starting with the DG10 that included both Data General and Intel CPUs in a patented closely coupled arrangement, able to run MS-DOS or CP/M-86 concurrently with DG/RDOS, with each benefiting from the hardware acceleration given by other CPU as a co-processor that would handle (for instance) screen graphics or disk operations concurrently. Other members of the Desktop Generation range, the DG20 and DG30, were aimed more at traditional commercial environments, such as multi-user COBOL systems, replacing refrigerator-sized minicomputers with toaster-sized modular microcomputers based around the microECLIPSE CPUs and some of the technology developed for the microNOVA-based “Micro Products” range such as the MP/100 and MP/200 that had struggled to find a market niche. The Single-processor version of the DG10, the DG10SP, was the entry-level machine with, like the DG20 and 30, no ability to run Intel software. Despite having some good features and having less direct competition from the flood of cheap PC compatibles, the Desktop Generation range also struggled, partly because they offered an economical way of running what was essentially “legacy software” while the future was clearly either slightly cheaper Personal Computers or slightly more expensive “super minicomputers” such as the MV and VAX computers.

Joint venture with Soviet company

On December 12, 1989, DG and Soviet Union software developer NPO Parma announced Perekat, the first joint venture between an American computer company and a Soviet company. DG would provide hardware and NPO Parma the software, and Austrian companies Voest Alpine Industrieanlagenbau GmbH and their marketing group Voest Alpine Vertriebe would build the plant.

Final downturn and EMC takeover

Despite Data General’s betting the AViiON farm on the Motorola 88000, Motorola decided to end production of that line. The 88000 had never been very successful, and DG was the only major customer. When Apple Computer and IBM proposed their joint solution based on POWER architecture, the PowerPC, Motorola picked up the manufacturing contract and killed the 88000. DG quickly responded and introduced new models of the AViiON series based on a true commodity processor, the Intel x86 series. By this time a number of other vendors, notably Sequent Computer Systems, were also introducing similar machines. The lack of lock-in now came back to haunt DG, and the rapid commoditization of the Unix market led to shrinking sales. DG did begin a minor shift toward the service industry, training their technicians for the role of implementing a spate of new x86-based servers and the new Microsoft Windows NT domain-driven, small server world. This never developed enough to offset the loss of high margin server business however.

Data General also targeted the explosion of the internet in the latter 1990s with the formation of the THiiN Line business unit, led by Tom West, which had a focus on creation and sale of so-called “internet appliances”. The product developed was called the SiteStak web server appliance and was designed as an inexpensive website hosting product. CLARiiON did better after finding a large niche for Unix storage systems, and its sales were still strong enough to make DG a takeover target. EMC Corporation, a major data storage company, announced that they would buy Data General and its assets in January 2002 for $1.1 Billion or $19.58 a share.[7] Although details of the acquisition specified that EMC had to take the entire company, and not just the storage line, EMC quickly ended all development and production of DG computer hardware and parts, effectively ending Data General’s presence in the segment. The maintenance business was sold to a third party, who also acquired all of DG’s remaining hardware components for spare parts sales to old DG customers. The CLARiiON line continued to be a major player in the market, and was marketed under that name until January 2012.[8] The Clariion and Celerra storage products evolved into EMC’s unified storage platform, the VNX platform. Data General would be only one of many New England based computer companies, including the original Digital Equipment Corporation that collapsed or were sold to larger companies after the 1980s. On the Internet, even the old Data General domain (dg.com), which contained a few EMC webpages that only mentioned the latter company in passing, was sold to the Dollar General discount department store chain in October 2009.

On April 23, 1987, Datacube registered the datacube.com domain name, making it 68th .com domain ever to be registered.

Datacube Inc. (1978–2005) was an image processing company that developed real-time hardware and software products for the industrial, medical, military and scientific markets.

Early history

Datacube was founded in the mid-70’s by Stanley Karandanis and J Stewart Dunn. In the early days, Datacube manufactured board level products for the Multibus, which was one of the first computer buses developed for microprocessors. Early boards designed by Dunn were PROM, RAM and character generator boards. Of these, character display boards such as the VT103 and VR107 were the best sellers, and were used in programmable read-only memory (PROM) programmers and similar systems. Karandanis, Datacube’s President and CEO, in his early career followed the leaders in the semiconductor field from Bell Labs through Transitron to Fairchild. Karandanis was director of engineering at Monolithic Memories (MMI) when John Birkner and H.T. Chua designed the first successful programmable logic device, the programmable array logic (PAL) device. His contacts in the semiconductor field were instrumental in providing Datacube with leading-edge components for its products.

An OEM asked Datacube if a frame grabber could be built on a Multibus board. At the time, a frame grabber was a large box with multiple boards. The VG120 was the first ever commercial single board frame grabber: based on programmable array logic (PAL), it had 320 x 240 x 6 bit resolution, grayscale video input and output. Karandanis hired Rashid Beg and Robert Wang from Matrox to develop the first Q-Bus (DEC LSI-11) frame grabber. They developed the QVG/QAF120 dual board, 8-bit product primarily for a new startup named Cognex. While the latter were developing the hardware for Datacube, they were also planning to spin off and form a competitor, Imaging Technology, which was later purchased by Dalsa. To recover from this loss, and to complete the QVG120 product, Dave Erickson was hired as a consultant in 1981 from Octek, by the engineering manager Paul Bloom. Dave came on full-time in 1982, as did Dave Simmons who was to head applications, and Bob Berger, who was to head software. At this time, Imaging Technology Inc. (ITI) was developing a line of frame grabber products for Multibus and Q-bus, with a ‘real time’ image processor based on a single point multiplier, adder and lookup table (LUT). In 1983, Karandanis hired Shep Siegel from Ampex, who had worked on the advanced and successful Ampex Digital Optics (ADO) real-time video spatial manipulator for the broadcast TV market.

With Dunn’s help, Simmons developed the VG123 Multibus and Q-bus frame grabber boards. During this development, Paul Bloom was killed in what was apparently a gangland style murder. The mystery of why this happened has never been solved. Dave Erickson was promoted to engineering manager to replace Bloom. Siegel came to add the SP123 image processor to the ‘123 family. But having worked on ADO, Siegel saw the limitations of the single-point architecture, and had a vision of what could be done by applying pipelined real-time imaging. He came with an understanding of digital signal processor devices (DSPs), image processing, filtering, and 2D warping, and with programmable logic in hand, saw what could be done. Erickson and Dunn had developed frame grabber boards deployed on most standard busses. Each potential new customer required features not currently available, and designing, laying out (using hand taped artwork) and manufacturing a board for a single customer was risky, slow and expensive. What was needed was a way to leverage the technology developed so that it could be applied to a wider customer base. Erickson felt that a modular architecture where functions could be easily added and a system tailored to a customers needs was critical.

At this time, the VME bus was being introduced by Motorola for their Motorola 68000 processors. The automotive and military markets liked the VMEbus because it was open and rugged. Datacube developers embarked on a marketing road trip to visit potential customers in the medical, automotive and military markets to inquire what imaging functions they needed.

MaxVideo 10

A Modular and expandable system based on the VMEbus form factor could meet many customer needs. MaxVideo and the MaxBus were born. Marketing research determined the primary functions required and a road map for the next few years. The first seven MaxVideo boards were Digimax (digitizer and display), Framestore (triple 512^2 framestore with unprecedented density), VFIR (first real-time 3×3 image filter, SNAP (3×3 Systolic Neighborhood Array Processor), Featuremax (real-time statistics) SP (single point general purpose processor) and Protomax (MaxVideo prototyping board). 10 beta customers were lined up to receive the first 7 boards. MaxWare was the software and drivers written to control the new boards. The first demo of the new hardware consisted of a camera’s output being processed in real time by VFIR and displayed on a monitor. Siegel wrote a loop that varied the VFIR coefficients on a frame-by-frame basis to demonstrate not only the video real-time functionality, but that the function could be easily changed. In the spring of 1985, the product was not production-ready, so private viewings were set up with potential customers at the Detroit Vision ’85 show. Customers’ reaction was positive and three months later the first shipments to customers went out.

MaxBus was based on the ‘123’s expansion bus. It required accurate synchronization: clocking and timing of each board plus a flexible way to route data from function to function. A simple differential ECL bus with a driver on one end and terminator on the opposite end was used. For data, 14 pin ribbon cables allowed 8-bit 10 MHz data to be routed from any output to any input. At this time the company started to grow. Barry Egan was brought on to head manufacturing, entrepreneur Barry Ungar was brought on as President. Bob Berger expanded the software department, and moved the main computers from CP/M machines to Unix machines based on LSI-11s from Digital Equipment Corporation. A Unix based Pyramid mainframe computer was purchased for hardware and software development. Berger bought the first Sun workstations and set up an Ethernet LAN. He registered “datacube.com” as the 68th internet domain name in existence (now owned by Brad Mugford). In hardware, John Bloomfield was hired from Ampex. The second tier of MaxVideo products was developed. Siegel began the first image warper consisting of Addgen, Interp, and XFS. John Bloomfield expanded the fixed 512 x 512 processing to include Regions-of-interest (ROI) processing. He began developing with the new FPGAs from Xilinx. RoiStore, MaxScan (first arbitrary sensor interface), VFIR-II and MaxSigma. These products established Datacube as the technology leader in real-time imaging.

It was clear that a better way than the low-level control of MaxScan was needed to manage complex new imaging pipelines. ImageFlow was developed. It provided full pipeline delay management and optimization, and a consistent API for programming imaging hardware. Key software programmers were brought on: Ken Woodland, Stephen Watkins and Ari Berman. Recognizing that not every imaging function could be best done in a pipeline, Siegel teamed with Analog Devices new digital signal processor (DSP) group to develop Euclid, based on the ADSP-2100. Color digitization was required for some markets, so Siegel teamed with broadcast consultant Robert Bleidt to develop Digicolor.

Datacube’s first generation image warper caught the attention of the ‘image exploitation’ industry and in particular, Lockheed. Later, Siegel developed the second generation warper for ROIs: Addgen MkII, based on the Weitek 3132, and Interp MkII. Dunn developed Megastore to handle the large images that this market required. By now the original SP and Featuremax were running out of steam so SP MKII and FeaturemaxMkII were developed. Erickson developed MaxMux, the first Datacube board to use a custom ASIC. The MaxMux ASIC was also used on ROIStore to route signals. To address the need to combine imaging and workstation graphics, Dunn and Erickson developed MaxView, a high resolution display with the ability to perform real time image display in a window. Watkins ported X Window to this display. Despite the fact that a single box of maxVideo hardware could replace a room full of hardware at Lockheed, the product was not bought. Lockheed made too much money on the legacy system to want to update to the newer, smaller, better system. A typical system now consisted of a MaxBox 20 slot VMEbus chassis with up to 20 boards installed. The largest MaxVideo system ever built was by Honeywell for aerial target identification. It consisted of five 20 slot chassis full of MaxVideo Hardware. A new MaxBus repeater was developed for these very large systems. Another important design-in for MaxVideo 10 was the FLIR pod test system built by Martin Marietta. Sandia National Labs adopted MaxVideo for a Radar image targeting system.

MaxVideo 20

The next step was to implement up to a full rack of MaxVideo 10 hardware in a dual slot VMEbus package, increase the pipeline to 20 MHz, maintain the modularity and flexibility, and eliminate most of the blue MaxBus cables. MaxVideo 20 was born. This required a new 3-port image memory module base on the 72 pin SIMM form factor and was developed by Dunn. Up to 6 memories were used on each Max20. Max20 also leveraged a new line of Imaging chips from LSI Corporation, including a 32 x 32 digital crosspoint and an 8×8 20 MHz finite impulse response (FIR) filter. Dunn developed a new display controller, AG capable of up to 40 MHz display, and Erickson developed a new family of 20 MHz analog and flexible digital front ends, AS and AD. Dunn developed the color digitizer, AC. Another feature of MaxVideo20 was the new general processing ASIC, AU developed by Dunn. This device contained many innovative linear, nonlinear and statistical imaging functions. Its architecture was to be the core of not only Max20 but the next generation imaging system as well. Built in the pre-RTL age of schematics, Dunn’s AU ASIC incorporated booth multipliers designed by mathematician Steve Gabriel. The memory SIMM was implemented with CPLDs, FPGAs and Graphics DRAM. It was limited to 1MB of memory and required 14 devices tightly packed onto the SIMM. Siegel developed VSIM, a fast and powerful ASIC to control high density SDRAMS and built a 3 device replacement SIMM. It was a triple ported image memory capable of 1, 4 or 16MB memory sizes, up to 40MB/s input and output bandwidths, and contained numerous image processing functions as well. VSIM technology was to be used on numerous future products.

A number of MaxModule processing modules were developed for MaxVideo 20. One of these was Siegel’s MiniWarper, a 20 MHz real-time warper based on a new ASIC design, MW4242. With the advent of MaxModules, it was now possible to implement an imaging function on a small and simple board with much less overhead than a full VME board. IBM military division in Gaithersburg MD was interested in a new image exploitation system, and so Datacube developed a third generation exploitation system for them. This powerful system used an extremely high bandwidth image memory and an address generator by Erich Whitney, capable of 7×7 spatial transformation matrices, all calculated with double precision floats. A powerful new display system, XI was developed to display the results. Unfortunately, due to the lack of a firm contract, IBM took only a couple of these systems and one year of Datacube’s talented engineering efforts were effectively wasted. But Datacube had other projects going. It leveraged several key technologies with MaxVideo 20. An off-the-shelf disk storage system was integrated to be used for medical and image exploitation systems, but this system had unsolvable technical problems, so Siegel developed MD, based on an off-the-shelf external SCSI RAID box A 12 bit digitizer, Digi-12 was developed by Erickson and was a key element in the Picker Digital Radiology system. Datacube designed an interface to a Sky array processor to obtain a GE military contract for a submarine sonar system.

MaxPCI

Until 1996, MaxVideo has been entirely VMEbus based. VMEbus, Unix, OS-9, VxWorks and Lynx-OS had served markets well, but Windows 95 and Pentium-based personal computers (PCs) with PCI bus were coming on strong. Clearly a PC version of MaxVideo was required. MaxPCI was developed over 2 years. VSIM was already capable of MAX PCI’s target processing speed of 40 MHz, but everything else needed to be updated or redesigned. The core of MaxPCI was a new, giant crosspoint ASIC: 50 x 40 x 8 with full ROI timing crosspoint and many imaging functions as well, developed by Whitney. Dunn redesigned the AU ASIC to operate at 40 MHz, and a new statistics unit was developed. Tim Ganley developed the acquisition subsystem and Simmons developed a new family of 40 MHz analog and digital front-ends, QA and QD.

For an integrated display, a VGA board from another imaging company, Univision was used. For a real-time disc solution, Shep developed NTD, a software solution for real-time disc access. Meanwhile, Datacube recognized the need to better help its customers develop complex solutions in the medical, web inspection and machine vision markets. So three vertical integration development groups were formed. Siegel headed Medical, Simmons headed Web, and Scott Roth headed Machine vision. Each of these groups developed systems for OEMs in their respective markets.

Technologies

Karandanis’ contacts in the semiconductor market gave Datacube a competitive edge in applying new technologies. In the early days, Video digital-to-analog converters (DACs) were large modules or expensive and power hungry bipolar devices. Datacube worked with Silicon Valley startup Telmos to develop the first integrated Video DAC. This was used on the ‘128 family as well as Digimax. It was the starting point for all Video DACs and RAMDACs by Brooktree and others. Datacube was to ride several technological waves including fast ADCs, disk drives, DRAM, DSP devices and custom ASICs. Programmable logic was the key to Datacube’s functional density: from the early days of bipolar programmable array logic (PAL) and programmable read-only memory (PROM) to generic array logic (GAL), to every generation of FPGAs from Xilinx and then Actel and Quick Logic, and Altera CPLDs. Many semiconductor manufacturers acknowledged that Datacube could help bring their new products to market. Datacube was an ideal beta site and they shared their roadmaps, latest offerings, and support. ASICs were critical to Datacube’s success. From the first small crosspoint: 3000 gates in 2 micrometres, AU: 40,000 gates in 0.8 micrometre, through VSIM, MiniWarper, AU40 and IXP. Each of these devices were leveraged across several products. After IXP the density and cost of FPGAs began to catch up to full ASICs and so FPGAs were the technologies of choice.

On November 17, 1986, Data I/O Corporation registered the data-io.com domain name, making it 42nd .com domain ever to be registered.

Data I/O Corporation is a manufacturer of programming and automated device handling systems for programmable integrated circuits. The company is headquartered in Redmond, Washington with sales and engineering offices in multiple countries. Data I/O was incorporated in 1969. Before the IBM PC was introduced, the company developed equipment that allowed electronic designers to program the non-volatile semiconductor devices with data stored on punched cards or ASCII-encoded (eight-level) punched paper tape. Over the next three decades the company rode the non-volatile technology wave as Bipolar, EPROM, EEPROM, NOR FLASH, Antifuse, FRAM and most recently, NAND FLASH devices were introduced by semiconductor vendors.

While not manufacturing semiconductors itself, Data I/O’s business is the design and manufacture of equipment that transfers data into various non-volatile semiconductor devices. These devices commonly are Flash Memory, Microcontroller devices and Programmable Logic Devices. Introduced in 2000, Data I/O FlashCORE technology is optimized for programming of NAND and NOR based flash devices and Flash microcontrollers and is sold in FlashPAK, PS-System, FLX500, and ProLINE-RoadRunner programmer models spanning engineering to high-volume offline and inline “just-in-time” manufacturing. Data I/O provides Tasklink for Windows software to set up FlashCORE programmers and specify data sources. In addition, they develop software that manages automated and remote programming, secures data and manages device serialization. Many of these work with TaskLink, while others are independent software packages. Data I/O manufactures two device programmers that can accommodate DIP (through-hole) devices, the Plus-48 and the Optima. Both are aimed at the small, (relatively) low-cost, desktop programmer (engineering) market.

Mass Storage Module

The revisions to the UniSite main board were done to support a new option. Data I/O created the Mass Storage Module (MSM). This consisted of an additional circuit board containing a miniature hard disk drive (either a 2.5 inch PATA/IDE device or a PCMCIA Type III card drive, depending on revision level) and appropriate interface circuitry. All the programmer’s operating software and device algorithms could be transferred to the MSM’s drive in less than a half-hour, obsoleting floppy diskettes. The latest revision is entirely solid-state, consisting of a single large FPGA chip as the board’s glue logic, an SPROM (Serial Programmable Read-Only Memory) chip, containing the FPGA’s operating code, a few SRAM chips for buffering and a solid-state or ‘Flash’ drive. The MSM remains an optional, field-installable module for the 3900 and Unisite. Unisite programmers require 8MB of user RAM and controller board revision 701-2313-00 or higher to utilize this option. In addition, the MSM requires operating software revisions of 6.6 or above.

All 3900 series programmers are MSM-compatible at the hardware level. Successful installation of the MSM in a 3900 programmer automatically turns it into the model 3980. MSM adds another option, a high-speed parallel port interface that supplements the programmer’s serial port. In conjunction with a Windows-based PC, and Data I/O’s TaskLink software, the parallel port greatly enhances the speed of data transfers to and from the programmer. As one example, a 1MB data file takes at least two minutes to be transferred into or out of a Unifamily programmer via the serial port at its highest available speed (19200 baud). The same file, transferred with the parallel port’s help, takes around 30–40 seconds. Any Unifamily programmer with ‘XPi’ after its name (Unisite-XPi, 3980-XPi) already has the MSM and parallel port options installed as standard equipment. These programmers represent the end of the Unifamily line and, although no longer in production, are fully supported.

Financial report mentions sale of “portfolio” of domains for $4.5 million.

The Group Company sold a portfolio of domain names for total consideration of $4.5m (£2.8m). The sale of Data.com domain name was completed in the month of June.

It is found interesting that the company refers to this as a “portfolio of domain names”, which means that more than just Data.com changed hands. But any other domains sold have negligible value compared to Data.com.

24 Hours in Cyberspace (February 8, 1996) was “the largest one-day online event” up to that date, headed by photographer Rick Smolan with Jennifer Erwitt, Tom Melcher, Samir Arora and Clement Mok. The project brought together the world’s top 1,000 photographers, editors, programmers, and interactive designers to create a digital time capsule of online life.”

Overview

24 Hours in Cyberspace was an online project which took place on the then-active website, cyber24.com (and is still online at a mirror website maintained by Georgia Tech). At the time, it was billed as the “largest collaborative Internet event ever”, involving thousands of photographers from all over the world, including 150 of the world’s top photojournalists. Then Second Lady Tipper Gore was one of its photographers. In addition, then Vice President Al Gore contributed the introductory essay to the Earthwatch section of the website. In this essay, he discusses the impact of the Internet on the environment, education, and increased communication between people. The goal was not to show pictures of websites and computer monitors, but rather images of people whose lives were affected by the use of the growing Internet. Photographs were sent digitally to editors working real-time to choose the best pictures to put on the project’s website. The website received more than 4 million hits in the 24 hours that the project was active.

24 Hours in Cyberspace served as a cover story for U.S. News and World Report.

The technological infrastructure of the project was provided by a startup company spinoff from Apple Computer named NetObjects that was founded by Samir Arora, David Kleinberg, Clement Mok and Sal Arora. The system supplied by NetObjects allowed Smolan’s international network of editors and photojounalists to submit text and images through web forms; it ran on Unix, relied on a database for content storage (Illustra) and used templating for easy and near-instantaneous page generation that obviated the need for the site’s editorial staff to have any coding skills. NetObjects was first to create the technology that would enable a team of the world’s top picture editors and writers to become instant Web page designers. It let them do what they do best—edit and write—and automatically generate finished, sophisticated Web pages that millions of people were able to see only minutes after they were designed. Three million people clicked onto the 24 Hours site; the blaze of publicity surrounding the 24 Hours in Cyberspace project helped NetObjects raise $5.4 million in venture capital.

The project reportedly cost as much as $5 million, and was funded with assistance from 50 companies, mostly in the form of loans of computer hardware and technology experts. Adobe Systems, Sun Microsystems and Kodak were listed as major supporters. 1996: “Cyberspace” is not yet a household word but is about to get a big boost in the public consciousness with an international, one-day event, 24 Hours in Cyberspace. Top editors, photographers, computer programmers and designers, contributing from all over the world, collaborated to document a single day on the internet. It became not only a digital time capsule but a coming-out party, of sorts, for a medium whose impact was as dramatic in its day as television was a half century earlier. 24 Hours in Cyberspace was the inspiration of photographer Rick Smolan, who created the “Day in the Life” photo-essay series. Smolan used the same formula as “Day in the Life,” recruiting 150 photojournalists to go out and chronicle a slice of everyday life, in this case as it pertained to the then-counterculturish phenomenon of the web. The technology of the internet was not the subject: Smolan wanted (and got) pictures of how different people in different cultures were using the internet, and the effect that the medium of cyberspace was having on their lives.

The resulting work was edited and then displayed on a website. It also appeared as the cover story of that week’s edition of U.S. News and World Report and, soon thereafter, as a coffee-table book. The project, billed as the “largest one-day online event,” cost around $5 million and was bankrolled by companies — like Sun Microsystems and Adobe — with a vested interest in the internet’s growth, as well as by individual contributors.

As it turned out, Feb. 8, 1996, fell on the very day that President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act (later overturned in court). Many activists turned their websites black that day, a protest mentioned briefly on the 24 Hours website and in the book.

Short for Computer Science Network, CSNET is a computer network that was developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation in the early 1980’s. Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for computer science departments at academic and research institutions that could not be directly connected to ARPANET, due to funding or authorization limitations. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of, and access to, national networking and was a major milestone on the path to development of the global Internet. CSNET was funded by the National Science Foundation for an initial three-year period from 1981 to 1984.

History

Lawrence Landweber at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepared the original CSNET proposal, on behalf of a consortium of universities (Georgia Tech, University of Minnesota, University of New Mexico, University of Oklahoma, Purdue University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Utah, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, and Yale University). The US National Science Foundation (NSF) requested a review from David J. Farber at the University of Delaware. Farber assigned the task to his graduate student Dave Crocker who was already active in the development of electronic mail. The project was deemed interesting but in need of significant refinement. The proposal eventually gained the support of Vinton Cerf and DARPA. In 1980, the NSF awarded $5 million to launch the network. It was an unusually large project for the NSF at the time.  A stipulation for the award of the contract was that the network needed to become self-sufficient by 1986.

The first management team consisted of Landweber (University of Wisconsin), Farber (University of Delaware), Peter J. Denning (Purdue University), Anthony Hearn (RAND Corporation), and Bill Kern from the NSF. Once CSNET was fully operational, the systems and ongoing network operations were transferred to Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) of Cambridge, Massachusetts by 1984.

By 1981, three sites were connected: University of Delaware, Princeton University, and Purdue University. By 1982, 24 sites were connected expanding to 84 sites by 1984, including one in Israel. Soon thereafter, connections were established to computer science departments in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, and Japan. CSNET eventually connected more than 180 institutions.

One of the earliest experiments in free software distribution on a network, netlib, was available on CSNET.

CSNET was a forerunner of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) which eventually became a backbone of the Internet. CSNET operated autonomously until 1989, when it merged with Bitnet to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN). By 1991, the success of the NSFNET and NSF-sponsored regional networks had rendered the CSNET services redundant, and the CSNET network was shut down in October 1991.

Components

The CSNET project had three primary components: an email relaying service (Delaware and RAND), a name service (Wisconsin), and TCP/IP-over-X.25 tunnelling technology (Purdue). Initial access was with email relaying, through gateways at Delaware and RAND, over dial-up telephone or X.29/X.25 terminal emulation. Eventually CSNET access added TCP/IP, including running over X.25.

The email relaying service was called Phonenet, after the telephone-specific channel of the MMDF software developed by Crocker. The CSNET name service allowed manual and automated email address lookup based on various user attributes, such as name, title, or institution. The X.25 tunneling allowed an institution to connect directly to the ARPANET via a commercial X.25 service (Telenet), by which the institution’s TCP/IP traffic would be tunneled to a CSNET computer that acted as a relay between the ARPANET and the commercial X.25 networks. CSNET also developed dialup-on-demand (Dialup IP) software to automatically initiate or disconnect SLIP sessions as needed to remote locations. CSNET was developed on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX-11 systems using BSD Unix, but it grew to support a variety of hardware and operating system platforms.

Recognition

At the July 2009 Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, the Internet Society recognized the pioneering contribution of CSNET by honoring it with the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award. Crocker accepted the award on behalf of Landweber and the other principal investigators.  A recording of the award presentation and acceptance is available.

Parties working on settlement documents to resolve trademark infringement lawsuit.

Cricket Communications and Cricket.com owner Global Cricket Ventures have reached a “settlement in principle” over the parties’ trademark infringement suit.

Cricket Communications filed the suit in February alleging that Cricket.com was charading as a cricket sport site but was no more than a site created to take advantage of the wireless carriers’ trademark. The company alleged that Global Cricket Ventures hard coded a Cricket Wireless logo into its web site in a position made to look like it was part of an ad.

Since then Cricket.com has removed all advertising related to wireless phones and has scaled down the site from even the basic shell that it was before.

My guess is the deal doesn’t involve handing over the Cricket.com domain name as the plaintiff wants, but Global Cricket Ventures stops displaying anything related to mobile phones.

“CreditCards.com, the domain name, has been purchased for $2.75 million by ClickSuccess, L.P., an Austin, Texas-based firm specializing in marketing financial products online. The purchase, announced yesterday (July 20, 2004), represents the fifth highest selling price for a domain name on record.” I have to admit, when I looked at those opening lines from a new press release today I started trying to find out who was behind the joke!

Not because CreditCards.com isn’t worth that kind of money (in fact many experts tell me it was probably worth more), but simply because we haven’t seen that kind of number attached to a pure domain name (no other business assets involved) for several years now. Casino.com was part of a $5.5 million dollar deal last October that included other assets (though that name alone would undoubtedly be in the same league). After consulting with a few people in the know, it soon became evident that this report was for real.

When close to $3 million changes hands for a domain name, it catches everyone’s attention, including the mainstream media, and that should go a long way toward educating buyers about the intrinsic value in high traffic domain names. Indeed, just minutes after I had starting looking into the details of the CreditCards.com sale, MSNBC called our office to get some background information on a story they are running on this purchase and the current boom in the domain market. Reporter Bob Sullivan told me that when the CreditCards.com price was announced in their newsroom everyone said “Well, here we go again!” assuming we were returning to late 90’s domain-bubble madness.

I explained that things are quite different today, with increased advertiser demand for highly targeted traffic producing reliable revenues that can be used to calculate true inherent value for a domain name (just as business revenues can be used to calculate a fair selling price for real world companies). Sullivan found the notion that there is some actual substance behind the pricing this time around to be fascinating and we spent a half hour talking about it. If other news outlets grasp this and accurately relay the message to the general public it can only have a positive impact on an industry that is already enjoying a rosy outlook after years in the briar patch.

There’s no doubt the new owners have a money machine on their hands with CreditCards.com. They have already installed links to virtually every major card offering as well as card comparison tools that should have thousands of regular visitors clicking like crazy, ringing up revenue from click-throughs and new customer conversion fees.

Craigslist (stylized as craigslist) is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, items wanted, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.

Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list to friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area. It became a web-based service in 1996 and expanded into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. cities in 2000, and now covers 70 countries.

In March 2008, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese became the first non-English languages Craigslist supported. As of August 9, 2012, over 700 cities and areas in 70 countries have Craigslist sites. Some Craigslist sites cover large regions instead of individual metropolitan areas—for example, the U.S. states of Delaware and Wyoming, the Colorado Western Slope, the California Gold Country, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are among the locations with their own Craigslist sites.

History

Having observed people helping one another in friendly, social, and trusting communal ways on the Internet via the WELL, MindVox and Usenet, and feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something similar for local events. In early 1995, he began an email distribution list to friends. Most of the early postings were submitted by Newmark and were notices of social events of interest to software and Internet developers living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Soon, word of mouth led to rapid growth. The number of subscribers and postings grew rapidly. There was no moderation and Newmark was surprised when people started using the mailing list for non-event postings. People trying to get technical positions filled found that the list was a good way to reach people with the skills they were looking for. This led to the addition of a jobs category. User demand for more categories caused the list of categories to grow. The initial technology encountered some limits, so by June 1995 Majordomo had been installed and the mailing list “Craigslist” resumed operations. Community members started asking for a web interface. Newmark registered “craigslist.org”, and the website went live in 1996. In the fall of 1998, the name “List Foundation” was introduced and Craigslist started transitioning to the use of this name. In April 1999, when Newmark learned of other organizations called “List Foundation”, the use of this name was dropped. Craigslist incorporated as a private for-profit company in 1999. Around the time of these events, Newmark realized the site was growing so fast that he could stop working as a software engineer and work full-time running Craigslist. By April 2000, there were nine employees working out of Newmark’s San Francisco apartment.

In January 2000, current CEO Jim Buckmaster joined the company as lead programmer and CTO. Buckmaster contributed the site’s multi-city architecture, search engine, discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature. He was promoted to CEO in November 2000.

The website expanded into nine more U.S. cities in 2000, four in 2001 and 2002 each, and 14 in 2003. On August 1, 2004, Craigslist began charging $25 to post job openings on the New York and Los Angeles pages. On the same day, a new section called “Gigs” was added, where low-cost and unpaid jobs and internships can be posted free.

Operations

The site serves more than 20 billion page views per month, putting it in 72nd place overall among websites worldwide and 11th place overall among websites in the United States (per Alexa.com on June 28, 2016), with more than 49.4 million unique monthly visitors in the United States alone (per Compete.com on January 8, 2010). With more than 80 million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives more than 2 million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world. The 23 largest U.S. cities listed on the Craigslist home page collectively receive more than 300,000 postings per day just in the “for sale” and “housing” sections as of October 2011. The classified advertisements range from traditional buy/sell ads and community announcements to personal ads. In 2009, Craigslist operated with a staff of 28 people.

Financials and ownership

In December 2006, at the UBS Global Media Conference in New York, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told Wall Street analysts that Craigslist had little interest in maximizing profit, and instead preferred to help users find cars, apartments, jobs and dates.

Craigslist’s main source of revenue is paid job ads in select American cities. The company does not formally disclose financial or ownership information. Analysts and commentators have reported varying figures for its annual revenue, ranging from $10 million in 2004, $20 million in 2005, and $25 million in 2006 to possibly $150 million in 2007.

On August 13, 2004, Newmark announced on his blog that auction giant eBay had purchased a 25% stake in the company from a former employee. Some fans of Craigslist expressed concern that this development would affect the site’s longtime non-commercial nature. As of April 2012, there have been no substantive changes to the usefulness or non-advertising nature of the site—no banner ads, charges for a few services provided to businesses.

The company was believed to be owned principally by Newmark, Buckmaster and eBay (the three board members). eBay owned approximately 25%, and Newmark is believed to own the largest stake.

In April 2008, eBay announced it was suing Craigslist to “safeguard its four-year financial investment”. eBay claimed that in January 2008, Craigslist executives took actions that “unfairly diluted eBay’s economic interest by more than 10%”. Craigslist filed a counter-suit in May 2008 to “remedy the substantial and ongoing harm to fair competition” that Craigslist claimed was constituted by eBay’s actions as Craigslist shareholders; the company claimed that it had used its minority stake to gain access to confidential information, which it then used as part of its competing service Kijiji.

On June 19, 2015, eBay Inc. announced that it would divest its stake back to Craigslist for an undisclosed amount, and settle its litigation with the company. The move came shortly before eBay’s planned spin-off of PayPal, and an effort to divest other units to focus on its core business.

Couponcodes.com domain name was purchased by a Austin company Vertive for an undisclosed sum.

Vertive is now stranger to the power of domain names. It operates Offers.com (it also owns Offer.com) and company founder Steve Schaffer sometimes attends domain name conferences.

On December 11, 1986, Convergent Media Systems Corporation registered the convergent.com domain name, making it 49th .com domain ever to be registered.

Convergent Media Systems Corporation provides digital media solutions to the enterprise market in the United States and internationally. It offers digital media solutions for applications, such as digital signage, interactivity, video walls, iBeacon integration, social media, sales assistance, wayfinding, employee communications, meeting rooms, and endless aisle. The company also media strategy, systems integration, content creation, network operations, and solution support services. It serves retail, bank, corporate digital, and healthcare digital signage markets. Convergent Media Systems Corporation was formerly known as EDS Video Services and changed its name to Convergent Media Systems Corporation in 1992. The company was founded in 1980 and is based in Alpharetta, Georgia with a location in Toronto, Canada. As of October 1, 2013, Convergent Media Systems Corporation operates as a subsidiary of Ballantyne Strong, Inc

Founded in 1980, Convergent Media Systems manages digital solutions for customers that span over 95,000 displays spread across over 22,000 locations, which are seen by more than 10 million people per day. Convergent Media Systems has long-standing customer relationships with companies such as Kroger, Safeway, and Best Buy Canada. Bryan Allen will continue to manage the Convergent Media Systems team.

The combination of Ballantyne Strong and Convergent Media Systems will create one of the largest and best capitalized companies providing digital technologies for out-of-home messaging, advertising and communication (the Digital Out-of-Home or DOOH market) and Enterprise Video Solutions (EVS), which provides enterprises with the infrastructure necessary for communication, collaboration, training and education of employees. In aggregate, the domestic DOOH and EVS markets are estimated to be more than $4.0 billion annually.

“This is a transformative acquisition that extends Ballantyne’s core expertise into adjacent markets experiencing strong growth,” said Gary L. Cavey, President and CEO of Ballantyne Strong. “Industry analysts expect the DOOH and EVS markets to grow at compounded annual rates of 26% and 16%, respectively, through 2015. With these markets being highly fragmented, there is a clear opportunity for Ballantyne to capture market share with a unique end-to-end, single source solution covering design and development of customer solutions, system integration, software, hardware, content creation and distribution, network monitoring and field services. With the addition of Convergent Media Systems’ existing customer base, we will be able to further leverage the established infrastructure of our Network Operations Center to enhance efficiencies within the combined company and provide a strong platform for continued growth. Following this acquisition, we will continue to have a very strong balance sheet, which will be a key differentiator in the DOOH and EVS markets, and will enable us to continue investing in growth opportunities going forward.”

In 1979, CompuServe became the first service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal computerusers. The company broke new ground again in 1980 as the first to offer real-time chat with its CB Simulator. Other major dial-in networks were AmericaOnline (AOL) and Prodigy that also provided communications, content, and entertainment features. Many bulletin board system (BBS) networks also providedon-line access, such as FidoNet which was popular amongst hobbyist computer users, many of them hackers and amateur radio operators.

CompuServe was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc. (the earliest advertising shows the name with initial caps) in Columbus, Ohio, as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance. While Jeffrey Wilkins, the son-in-law of Golden United founder Harry Gard, Sr., is widely credited as the first president of CompuServe, the initial president was actually Dr. John R. Goltz.[1] Goltz and Wilkins were both graduate students in electrical engineering at the University of Arizona. Early employees also recruited from the University of Arizona included Sandy Trevor (inventor of the CompuServe CB Simulator chat system), Doug Chinnock, and Larry Shelley. Wilkins replaced Goltz as CEO within the first year of operation.

The company objectives were twofold: to provide in-house computer processing support to Golden United Life Insurance; and to develop as an independent business in the computer time-sharing industry, by renting time on its PDP-10 midrange computers during business hours. It was spun off as a separate company in 1975, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol CMPU.

Concurrently, the company recruited executives who shifted the focus from offering time-sharing services, in which customers wrote their own applications, to one that was focused on packaged applications. The first of these new executives was Robert Tillson, who left Service Bureau Corporation (then a subsidiary of Control Data, but originally formed as a division of IBM) to become CompuServe’s Executive Vice President of Marketing. He then recruited Charles McCall (who followed Jeff Wilkins as CEO, and later became CEO of medical information firm HBO & Co.), Maury Cox (who became CEO after the departure of McCall), and Robert Massey (who followed Cox as CEO). Barry Berkov was recruited from Xerox to head product development and marketing.

In 1977, CompuServe’s board changed the company’s name to CompuServe Incorporated. In 1980, H&R Block acquired CompuServe. The purchase provided cash to expand operations, and helped H&R Block diversify its tax-season based earnings.

Technology

The original 1969 dial-up technology was fairly simple—the local phone number in Cleveland, for example, was a line connected to a time-division multiplexer that connected via a leased line to a matched multiplexer in Columbus that was connected to a time-sharing host system. In the earliest buildups, each line terminated on a single machine at CompuServe’s host, so different numbers had to be used to reach different computers.

Later, the central multiplexers in Columbus were replaced with PDP-8 minicomputers, and the PDP-8s were connected to a DEC PDP-15 minicomputer that acted as switches so a phone number was not tied to a particular destination host. Finally, CompuServe developed its own packet switching network, implemented on DEC PDP-11 minicomputers acting as network nodes that were installed throughout the US (and later, in other countries) and interconnected. Over time, the CompuServe network evolved into a sophisticated multi-tiered network incorporating Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Frame relay (FR), Internet Protocol (IP) and X.25 technologies.

In 1981, The Times explained CompuServe’s technology in one sentence:

Compuserve is offering a video-text-like service permitting personal computer users to retrieve software from the mainframe computer over telephone lines. CompuServe was also a world leader in other commercial services. One of these was the Financial Services group, which collected and consolidated financial data from myriad data feeds, including CompuStat, Disclosure, I/B/E/S as well as the price/quote feeds from the major exchanges. CompuServe developed extensive screening and reporting tools that were used by many investment banks on Wall Street.

CIS

The consumer information service had been developed almost clandestinely, in 1978, and marketed as MicroNET through Radio Shack. Many within the company did not favor the project; it was called schlock time-sharing by the commercial time-sharing sales force. It was allowed to exist initially because consumers used the computers during evening hours, when the CompuServe computers were otherwise idle. As it became evident that it would be a hit, CompuServe dropped the MicroNET name in favor of their own. CompuServe’s origin was approximately concurrent with that of The Source. Both services were operating in early 1979, being the first online services. MicroNet was made popular through the Issue 2 of Commodore Disk User, which included programs on how to connect and run MicroNet programs.

By the mid-1980s CompuServe was one of the largest information and networking services companies in existence, and it was the largest consumer information service in the world. It operated commercial branches in more than 30 US cities, selling primarily network services to major corporations throughout the United States. Consumer accounts could be bought in most computer stores (a box with an instruction manual and a trial account login) and awareness of this service was extremely high. By 1987, the consumer side would be 50% of CompuServe revenues. The service continued to improve in terms of user interface and offerings, and in 1989 CompuServe purchased and dismantled one of its main competitors, The Source.

The corporate culture was entrepreneurial, encouraging “skunkworks projects”. Alexander “Sandy” Trevor secluded himself for a weekend, writing the “CB Simulator”, a chat system that soon became one of CIS’s most popular features. Instead of hiring employees to manage the forums, they contracted with sysops, who received compensation based on the success of their own forum’s boards, libraries, and chat areas.

In September 2003 CompuServe Information Service, which had become a division of AOL, added CompuServe Basic to its product lines, selling via Netscape.com. AOL offered the CompuServe Basic service to departing AOL members, possibly in response to reports earlier that year that AOL was losing significant business to low-cost competitors.

The interest in commercial use of the Internet became a hotly debated topic. Although commercial use was forbidden, the exact definition of commercial use could be unclear and subjective. UUCPNet and theX.25 IPSS had no such restrictions, which would eventually see the official barring of UUCPNet use of ARPANET and NSFNET connections. Some UUCP links still remained connecting to these networks however, as administrators cast a blind eyeto their operation. During the late1980s, the first Internet service provider (ISP) companies were formed.Companies like PSINet,UUNET, Netcom, and Portal Software were formed to provide service to the regional research networks and provide alternate network access,UUCP-based email and Usenet News to the public. The first commercial dialup ISP in the United States wasThe World, opened in 1989.

1989 military use . In 1989, the DECnet-based Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN) and the TCP/IP-based NASA Science Network (NSN) were brought together at NASA Ames Research Center creating the first multiprotocol widearea network called the NASA Science Internet, or NSI. NSI was established to provide a totally integrated communications infrastructure to the NASA scientific community for the advancement of earth, space and life sciences. Asa high-speed, multiprotocol, international network, NSI provided connectivityto over 20,000 scientists across all seven continents.

1989 TCP/IP goes global and in 1989 CERN opened its first external TCP/IP connections. This coincided with thecreation of Réseaux IPEuropéens (RIPE), initially a group of IP network administrators who met regularly to carry out co-ordination work together. Later, in 1992, RIPE was formally registered as a cooperative in Amsterdam.

1989 TCP/IP goes global At the same time as the rise of internetworking in Europe, ad hoc networking to ARPA and in-between Australian universities formed, based on various technologies such as X.25 and UUCPNet.These were limited in their connection to the global networks, due to the cost of making individual international UUCP dial-up or X.25 connections. In 1989,Australian universities joined the push towards using IP protocols to unify their networking infrastructures. AARNet was formed in 1989 by the AustralianVice-Chancellors’ Committee and provided a dedicated IP based network forAustralia.

1989 The Internet began to penetrate Asia in the late 1980s.Japan, which had built the UUCP-based network JUNET in 1984, connected to NSFNET in 1989. It hosted the annual meeting of the Internet Society, INET’92, in Kobe. Singapore developed TECHNET in 1990, and Thailand gained a globalInternet connection between Chulalongkorn University and UUNET in 1992.

1989 InterNIC created the nato domain for use by NATO. NATO considered none of the then existing TLDs as adequately reflecting their status as an international organization. Soon after this addition, however, InterNIC also created the int TLD for the use by international organizations in general, and persuaded NATO to use the second level domain nato.int instead. The nato TLD, no longer used, was finally removed in July 1996.

In December 2009 there were 192 million domain names. A large fraction of them are in the .com TLD, which as of March 15, 2010 had 84 million domain names, including 11.9 million online business and e-commerce sites, 4.3 million entertainment sites, 3.1 million finance related sites, and 1.8 million sports sites.  As of July 2012 the .com TLD has more registrations than all of the others combined.

Why .Com Domain Name is the King of all TLDs?

• 1 As of 2013, DomainTools.Com reported that approximately 109 million .com domains were registered.
• 2 As per VeriSign 97% of the top 100 brands have a registered.com domain
• 3 75% of globally registered domains (TLDs) are .com
• 4 93% of the Fortune Global 100 use .coms
• 5 The introduction of biz in 2001, which is restricted to businesses, has had no impact on the popularity of .com
• 6 The symbolics.com domain was originally registered on 15 March 1985, making it the first .com-domain in the world
• 7 More number of dot coms are bought and sold via auction and end user sales each weak than any other tld or cctld
• 8 Domainers and companies has the opinion that search engine prefer dot com website over any other non dot com
• 9 There are more number of dot com trademark cases and issues for which the complainant and the respondent have gone to court
• 10 Many Domainer and website masters says that dot com is the king when it comes to internet
• 11 Dot com receives more type-in-traffic than any other domain domain name suffix
• 12 Quite good number of domainers became rich and famous by trading early on domain names consisting of dot com’s portfolio’s
• 13 Domainer Celebreties such as Rick Schwartz, Adam Dicker, Frank Schilling, Elliot Silver, Ron Jackson and many other owe their successes to the dot com opportunity
• 14 Most good dot coms are already taken and what is left is not the best a registrant can have
• 15 On all domain name registrants websites such as Godaddy, Namecheap, and Name dot coms you’ll see the first extension as to register a domain name as dot com
• 16 There is more number of cases where hijackers tried their brains to grab precious domain name containing the dot com extensions and some hijackers were jailed too
• 17 dot-com companies experienced meteoric rises in their stock prices during the dot com bubble roughly from year 1997-2000
• 18 Big Acquisitions by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other Tech giants were targeted mostly towards dot com sites such as Youtube.Com, Hotmail.Com, Geocities.com
• 19 There is no registration restrictions, means, anybody, whether he/she owns a business or not is eligible to have a dot com of his/her choice provided it is not already taken
• 20 Dot com introduced by Verisign Inc in the year 1985 and today it’s 28 years old
• 21 Dot com disputes policies are controlled by Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP)
• 22 Initially the fee was US$50 for registering a dot com domain name but now it’s almost 10 US Dollars
• 23 The dot com pace usually picked up from the year 1996 onward by that token you may see it as just 17 years old
• 24 Most of the companies own one or many dot coms and country code top level domain too such .us, .co.uk, .in, etc
• 25 By 1992, fewer than 15,000 .com domains were registered 20 years now the amount of dot com is just mind blowing
• 26 As of July 2012 the .com TLD has more registrations worldwide than all of the others combined
• 27 Domain names especially ending with dot com are regarded as online real-estate assets. Domain name like sex.com fetched 13 million USD followed by Fund.Com at US$9.9
• 28 The dot net domain name extension is usually regarded as the next best alternative to dot com domain name in the instance of non-availability of a dot com domain
• 29 According to SEDO’s figures the average dot com for quarter 4 of year 2012 sold for a sum of 1,914 USD
• 30 Many brands such as Google, Yahoo and others give credit to the dot com revolutions. It’s dot com that made Google number 1 brand worldwide
• 31 In the US the a .com domain name is very important and it’s wildly and widely chosen above any other extension
• 32 In some cases not having a dot com for your business means you not have the money to get one from the secondary market or you underestimated the dot com power
• 33 Under top 10 Alexa worldwide websites ranking – all are dot com oriented websites starting with Google
• 34 Facebook.com bought the short abbreviated version FB.Com by paying 8.5 US$ – type FB.Com and you’re there at facebook
• 35 Most of the Internet users add dot com (.com) when they type in at address bar to search something. Dot com as a domain name extension is naturally thought of.
• 36 Generic domain names having a dot com extension with good search volume commands a high price in domain aftermarket
• 37 Diapers is accessed world wide through direct navigation than through the search results and its extension is dot com and is number one when it comes to type-in-traffic
• 38 The chance of dot net or any other TLD being registered with a name that doesn’t have a dot com extension associated with it occurs in rarest of rare cases
• 39 Most of the companies registers many typos of their dot com version to tap into that typo user. Example type gogle at address bar and you are at Google.com; type del.com and you at Dell
• 40 Taking the world population into count there are approximately 1.5% of dot coms are being registered. The market will just keep on rising for dot com.
• 41 It’s quite hard to find a suitable domain name available in a dot com version for your company in English language but it does not mean end of the road.
• 42 The best way to find a suitable dot com for your company or for your own self is to find it at aftermarket places like Sedo.com, Godaddy.com, Snapnames.com, etc.
• 43 dot com basically stands for .commercial and commercial means “concerned with or engaged in commerce and commerce stands for buying and selling in large quantities
• 44 The first choice of Domainers who sell domains is dot com and all other comes next
• 45 When people think about the web they automatically and subconsciously think about dot com that’s why Interent in an early stage called as dot com bubble

Code Red was a computer worm observed on the Internet on July 15, 2001. It attacked computers running Microsoft’s IIS web server.

The Code Red worm was first discovered and researched by eEye Digital Security employees Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh, the Code Red worm exploited a vulnerability discovered by Riley Hassell. They named it “Code Red” because Code Red Mountain Dew was what they were drinking at the time.

Although the worm had been released on July 13, the largest group of infected computers was seen on July 19, 2001. On this day, the number of infected hosts reached 359,000.

Concept

Exploited vulnerability

The worm showed a vulnerability in the growing software distributed with IIS, described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-033, for which a patch had been available a month earlier.

The worm spread itself using a common type of vulnerability known as a buffer overflow. It did this by using a long string of the repeated letter ‘N’ to overflow a buffer, allowing the worm to execute arbitrary code and infect the machine with the worm. Kenneth D. Eichman was the first to discover how to block it, and was invited to the White House for his discovery.

Code Red II

Code Red II is a computer worm similar to the Code Red worm. Released two weeks after Code Red on August 4, 2001, although similar in behavior to the original, analysis showed it to be a new worm instead of a variant. Different from the first the second has no attacking function, but a backdoor to allow attacks. The worm was designed to exploit a security hole in the indexing software included as part of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) web server software.

A typical signature of the Code Red II worm would appear in a web server log as:

GET /default.ida?XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801

%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3

%u0003%u8b00%u531b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a HTTP/1.0

When the original worm tried to infect other computers at random, Code Red II tried to infect machines on the same subnet as the infected machine.

Microsoft had already released a security patch for IIS that fixed the security hole on June 18, 2001, however not everyone had patched their servers, including Microsoft themselves.

Nimda

Nimda is a file infecting computer worm. It quickly spread, surpassing the economic damage caused by previous outbreaks such as Code Red. Nimda utilized several types of propagation techniques and this caused it to become the Internet’s most widespread virus/worm within 22 minutes.

The worm was released on September 18, 2001. Due to the release date, exactly one week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, some media quickly began speculating a link between the virus and Al Qaeda, though this theory ended up proving unfounded.

Nimda affected both user workstations (clients) running Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000 or XP and servers running Windows NT and 2000.

The worm’s name origin comes from the reversed spelling of “admin”.

F-Secure found the text “Concept Virus(CV) V.5, Copyright(C)2001 R.P.China” in the Nimda code, suggesting its country of origin.

Methods of infection

Nimda was so effective partially because it—unlike other infamous malware like the Morris worm or Code Red—uses five different infection vectors:

Email

Open network shares

Browsing of compromised web sites

exploitation of various Microsoft IIS 4.0 / 5.0 directory traversal vulnerabilities. (Both Code Red and Nimda were hugely successful exploiting well known and long solved vulnerabilities in the Microsoft IIS server.)

Back doors left behind by the “Code Red II” and “sadmind/IIS” worms.

.co is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to Colombia. It is administered by .CO Internet S.A.S. As of July 10, 2010, there are no registration restrictions on second-level .co domains; any individual or entity in the world can register a .co domain.

.co has become increasingly popular among tech startups. The .co domain is also used by many established brands for social and mobile media, such as Twitter (t.co), Google Inc. (g.co), Amazon.com (a.co), American Express (amex.co) and Starbucks (sbux.co).

.co domain names are available for registration globally through accredited registrars.

.CO Internet S.A.S from Bogotá, Colombia, was appointed as the manager for the .co TLD through a public procurement process that took place in early 2009. .CO Internet received the re-delegation approval as the manager of the .co TLD by ICANN on December 9, 2009, and received formal confirmation of the request by the United States Department of Commerce on December 23, 2009.

When they took over administration of the .CO domain, .CO Internet S.A.S. implemented new domain policies that were more flexible than the historic ones that had been administered by the University of the Andes. The new policies were adjusted to international best practices and defined in consultation with local and international communities. With the new policies, Colombia would be able to sell second-level domain names to the world, such as widgets.co, where previously only third-level domain names were available, such as widgets.com.co.

To celebrate the launch of second-level domains, the registry auctioned the first single letter .CO domain name “e.CO” during Internet Week on June 10, 2010. A video of the auction can be seen here: For a purchase price of $81,000, the winner of the auction was internet entrepreneur Lonnie Borck of B52 Media. Proceeds were donated to a charitable cause of the winner’s choice.

As of June 2011, more than 1 million .CO domains had been registered by people in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. As of January 2014, that number has grown to over 1.6 million .CO domains registered.

With respect to search engine optimization, Google confirmed that “it will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted”.

Google has also confirmed that it will treat .co as a gccTLD for purposes of indexing and seo.

More information about .CO and SEO can be found on the Registry’s consumer facing website, including videos from Google’s SEO expert Matt Cutts confirming Google’s positive treatment of .CO for SEO purposes.

History

IANA delegates ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as country code top-level domains, and on December 24, 1991, the .co top-level domain was assigned to Colombia and delegated to the Universidad de los Andes.

In 2001, the university began to consider the possibility of marketing the domain as an alternative to the generic top-level domains. The government of Colombia objected on the basis that the university, a private entity, did not have regulatory oversight of the TLD and the Minister of Communications, Angela Montoya Holguín, wrote to them requesting that they not continue. In turn the university wrote to ICANN, rejecting the government’s objections and stating their intention to appoint a subcontractor to handle the commercialisation of the domain.

At a meeting on December 11, 2001, Holguín asked the Consultative Chamber and Civil Service of the Council of State to consider three issues:

• whether the .co domain is a public resource
• if the domain is public resource, whether it is intrinsically linked with telecommunications
• if the domain is linked with telecommunications, who should profit from its commercialisation
• In relation to these three issues, the meeting concluded that:

the .co domain, having been assigned to Colombia, is of public interest

the administration of the domain is intrinsically related to telecommunications, and hence falls under the purview of the Ministry of Communications, with the exception of those functions assigned to the ICFES by the Ministry of National Education

unless the Congress of Colombia adopts an act allowing tax to be collected in relation to the registration of domain names, no amount can be charged for such a service

In response to the Council of State meeting, the university wrote to ICANN on 12 February 2002 stating that it had abandoned plans to commercialise the domain, and that as it could “no longer bear the administrative and operational responsibilities” it wished to discontinue its responsibility for operating the domain.

Finally, with the enactment of Law 1065 of 2006, the Ministry of Communications of Colombia initiated a public consultation process involving local and international participants, including members of the ICANN community, with the objective of defining the future of the .CO TLD. As a result of that process, through Resolution 001652 of 2008, the Ministry approved new policies that would govern the administration of the .CO TLD. A public procurement process began which resulted in the award of the administration contract to .CO Internet SAS. Finally, on February 7, 2010, the administration of the TLD was transitioned from the University of Andes to .CO Internet SAS, under the regulatory and policy supervision of the Ministry of Communications of Colombia.

On July 20, 2010, second level .co domains became available to the rest of the world on a first-come, first-served basis.

In a historic moment for Colombia and the .CO domain extension, ICANN celebrated its 39th International public meeting in Cartagena de Indias from December 5, 2010 through December 10, 2010. The meeting’s host was .CO Internet S.A.S., the registry operator of the .CO domain.

In addition to more than 1000 guests from 100 countries, the meeting was introduced by Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos, Communications Minister Diego Molano, ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, and ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom. During his opening remarks, .CO Internet CEO Juan Diego Calle hailed the meeting as one of historic proportion, marking Colombia’s entry into the world stage as a new and significant player in the development of the Internet.

In 2014, .CO Internet S.A.S was acquired by Neustar for US$109 Million, and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Neustar. It is responsible for the promotion, administration, and technical operation of the .co TLD.