Today Sedo and its research partner (now an employee) released an updated version of the IDNX, a price index for domain names.

Top level domain options now include .com, .net, .org, .biz., .info, .mobi, .eu, .de, .co.uk, and .es.

With the TLD analysis, Sedo draws two key conclusions that are relevant to companies considering introducing new top level domain names. First, historic performance of .net and .org could not close the gap market leader .com. Both price trends and registration numbers show that demand for “second-best” substitutes has been modest, at best.

Second, the relative success of .info vs. .biz and .eu shows that a TLD can be successfully introduced to the market, which Sedo says provides encouraging news for aspiring registries.

This latter point is worth noting, although I think the introduction of new TLDs will be very different from when .info and .biz were introduced. .Info was well marketed. Neustar, which operates .biz, looked at itself as more of a technical provider than a marketer for that TLD.

Robert Melancton “Bob” Metcalfe (born April 7, 1946 is an electrical engineer from the United States who co-invented Ethernet, founded 3Com and formulated Metcalfe’s Law. As of January 2006, he is a general partner of Polaris Venture Partners. Starting in January 2011, he holds the position of Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of Innovation at The University of Texas at Austin.

Early life

In 1964, Metcalfe graduated from Bay Shore High School to join the MIT Class of 1968. He finally graduated from MIT in 1969 with two S.B. degrees, one in Electrical Engineering and the other in Industrial Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He then went to Harvard for graduate school, earning his M.S. in Applied Mathematics in 1970 and his PhD in Computer Science (Applied Mathematics) in 1973.

Career

While pursuing a doctorate in computer science, Metcalfe took a job with MIT’s Project MAC after Harvard refused to let him be responsible for connecting the school to the brand-new ARPAnet. At MIT’s Project MAC, Metcalfe was responsible for building some of the hardware that would link MIT’s minicomputers with the ARPAnet. Metcalfe was so enamored with ARPAnet, he made it the topic of his doctoral dissertation.The first version wasn’t accepted. His inspiration for a new dissertation came while working at Xerox PARC where he read a paper about the ALOHA network at the University of Hawaii. He identified and fixed some of the bugs in the AlohaNet model and made his analysis part of a revised thesis, which finally earned him his Harvard PhD in 1973.

Metcalfe was working at Xerox PARC in 1973 when he and David Boggs invented Ethernet, initially a standard for connecting computers over short distances. Metcalfe identifies the day Ethernet was born as May 22, 1973, the day he circulated a memo titled “Alto Ethernet” which contained a rough schematic of how it would work. “That is the first time Ethernet appears as a word, as does the idea of using coax as ether, where the participating stations, like in AlohaNet or ARPAnet, would inject their packets of data, they’d travel around at megabits per second, there would be collisions, and retransmissions, and back-off,” Metcalfe explained. Boggs identifies another date as the birth of Ethernet: November 11, 1973, the first day the system actually functioned.

In 1979, Metcalfe departed PARC and founded 3Com, a manufacturer of computer networking equipment. In 1980 he received the ACM Grace Hopper Award for his contributions to the development of local networks, specifically Ethernet. In 1990 Metcalfe lost a boardroom skirmish at 3Com in the contest to succeed Bill Krause as CEO. The board of directors chose Eric Benhamou to run the networking company Metcalfe had founded in his Palo Alto apartment in 1979. Metcalfe left 3Com and began a 10-year stint as a publisher and pundit, writing an Internet column for InfoWorld. He became a venture capitalist in 2001 and is now a General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners. In 1997, he cofounded Pop!Tech, an executive technology conference.

In November 2010 Metcalfe was selected to lead innovation initiatives at The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering. He began his appointment in January 2011.

Awards

Metcalfe was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1996 for “exemplary and sustained leadership in the development, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet.” He received the 2003 Marconi Award for “For inventing the Ethernet and promulgating his Law of network utility based on the square of the nodes”

Metcalfe received the National Medal of Technology from President Bush in a White House ceremony on March 14, 2003, “for leadership in the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet”, having been selected for the honor in 2003.

In May 2007, along with 17 others, Metcalfe, was inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, for his work with Ethernet technology.

In October 2008, Metcalfe received the Fellow Award from the Computer History Museum “for fundamental contributions to the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet.”

Incorrect predictions

Outside of his technical achievements, Metcalfe is perhaps best known for his 1995 prediction that the Internet would suffer a “catastrophic collapse” the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass. This was after he tried to eat his words in the form of a very large cake, but the audience strongly protested. During an event where he talked about predictions at the eighth International World Wide Web Conference in 1999, a participant asked: what is the bet?. He stated that there was no bet as he was not ready to eat another column.

Metcalfe is also known for his harsh criticism of open source software, and Linux in particular, predicting that the latter would be obliterated after Microsoft released Windows 2000:

The Open Source Movement’s ideology is utopian balderdash [… that] reminds me of communism. […] Linux [is like] organic software grown in utopia by spiritualists When they bring organic fruit to market, you pay extra for small apples with open sores – the Open Sores Movement. When [Windows 2000] gets here, goodbye Linux.

He later recanted to some extent, saying in a column two weeks later:

I am ashamed of myself for not resisting the temptation to take cheap shots in my column … I should not have fanned the flames by joking about the Open Sores initiative.

He also predicted that wireless networking would die out in the mid 1990s.:

After the wireless mobile bubble bursts this year, we will get back to stringing fibers … bathrooms are still predominantly plumbed. For more or less the same reason, computers will stay wired.

The head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the global body which manages the technical infrastructure of the Web, has announced he will not seek another term.

Rod Beckstrom, an American who took over as president and chief executive of ICANN in July 2009, said he will step down from the position when his term ends on July 1, 2012.

“I am incredibly proud of ICANN’s achievements throughout my tenure,” Beckstrom said in a statement.

“In two short years we have advanced this organization to a new level of professionalism and productivity, and turned it into a genuinely multinational organization that will serve the world community long after my time here.”

There have been a number of notable moves at ICANN during Beckstrom’s tenure.

In September 2009, the United States loosened its control over ICANN, granting it greater autonomy and opening it up to international oversight.

A California-based non-profit corporation, ICANN manages the Domain Name System (DNS) that forms the technical backbone of the Web.

Since 1998, ICANN has operated under an agreement with the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

During Beckstrom’s term, ICANN also began introducing internationalized domain names that allow Internet users to access the Web using native scripts rather than only Latin characters.

In June, ICANN agreed to expand the number of generic top-level domains such as .com, .net and .org..

Under the changes, businesses, for example, such as Apple, Toyota and BMW can apply for domain names ending in .apple, .toyota or .bmw.

ICANN has also been piloting the shift to Internet Protocol version 6, the next generation of Internet addresses designed to replace the dwindling pool of 4.3 billion unique identifiers in the original system.

Rosemount Engineering was founded in 1956 with a focus on the aerospace industry growing rapidly under the expansion of the U.S. space program. In 1966, the company diversified its customer base by targeting not only government agencies, but also the commercial processing industry.  Rosemount Inc. is a subsidiary of Emerson Electric Company that manufactures and sells sensors that measure pressure, temperature, level, and flow. Its headquarters is located in Shakopee, Minnesota.

Company History:

Rosemount Inc., which began as a space-age engineering company, designs and produces measurement instrumentation for industrial applications. The complex sensors and transmitters the company manufacturers are critical components of sophisticated energy, process, and manufacturing facilities. Purchased by Emerson Electric Co. in 1976, Rosemount proved to be a top performer for the century-old company. Rosemount was integrated with another Emerson acquisition, Fisher Controls International, in 1992. The combined operations of Fisher and Rosemount represent the largest supplier of process control equipment in the world. Rosemount’s history is linked to the development of supersonic jet aircraft and the United States-Soviet Union space race. Dr. Frank D. Werner, a scientist and inventor, was involved in temperature and pressure sensor research at The Rosemount Research Center at the University of Minnesota when the U.S. Air Force asked him to manufacture the total temperature sensors he had developed for their high-performance aircraft. Werner asked Robert E. Keppel, an engineer at the aeronautical lab, and Vernon H. Heath, the business manager, to join him in the part-time project. With $8,000 in seed money the men incorporated Rosemount Engineering Company in 1956. They produced their first product in a building that had once been a chicken hatchery.

The total temperature sensors they produced could measure the air compression-caused heat which was generated during high speed flights. The technological breakthrough allowed test pilots to get precise readings on the speed of their prototype jets for the first time. The start-up company sold $30,000 worth of the sensors in their first year. The next year they had a full-time operation with 20 employees and sales of $196,000. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The United States responded by accelerating the pace of their own space program, and Rosemount’s sensors were soon in demand for deep space exploration applications.

Rosemount Engineering was a custom business in those early days. The government supplied the company with sensor specifications, and Rosemount would fabricate them. Nearly all its sensors were used in aircraft and missiles. Its products were technologically advanced and produced at low volumes and high labor costs; in 1960, 24 of the company’s 144 employees were engineers. Sales reached $1.5 million in 1960, but the owners still needed a $300,00 bank loan to keep going. Expansion costs associated with new products, such as low-pressure sensors, were outpacing sales. But revenues continued to rise steadily and reached $5.6 million by 1963 with earnings of $240,000. “By then we were also getting a little smug about our success,” said Vernon Heath in a March 1984 Star Tribune article. “We were innovative, we were growing, and we thought we could make anything happen if it involved technology.” The company made a stab at a consumer product line. It developed the first engineered, molded-plastic ski boot–which eventually found its way to a place in the Smithsonian Institution–but plagued the company with manufacturing problems and high costs. High performance aircraft and the space program continued to be the forces propelling the company forward in the 1960s. McDonnell’s Gemini, North American’s Saturn and Apollo, Martin’s Titan Series, General Dynamics F111, Lockheed’s C-141, Douglas’ DC9, Boeings’s 707, 720, and 727, and the European Supersonic Concorde all depended on Rosemount sensors. Rosemount celebrated the end of its first decade with sales of $8.5 million and a 19 percent increase in profits. By 1965 they had developed a British subsidiary, Rosemount Engineering Company Limited, which served the aircraft manufacturing market in England. Applications for temperature and pressure sensors were being expanded and associated equipment, such as airplane stall warning and ice detection systems, were added to the product line. But only seven percent of Rosemount sales were coming from the industrial market.

When Vernon Heath succeeded Werner as president of Rosemount Engineering Company in mid-1968, he faced changes in the industries it depended on for the vast majority of its sales. Heath attributed a 7.15 percent decrease in sales in 1969 to a shift in the defense industry. Net income had risen but only due to the sale of a manufacturing plant and the ski boot division. The ski boot line, which was sold to G. H. Bass & Co., had cost the company more than $2 million in losses. Undaunted, Rosemount rolled another high-tech project out and into a wholly owned subsidiary named Unifol Systems Co. Unifol was a computer controlled, air pressure levitated and propelled personal rapid transit (PRT) system. A Honeywell researcher, who had worked on and then purchased the rights for the project, interested Frank Werner in pursuing its development. Rosemount had hoped to fund the project with public financing or equity participation by another firm, but even with renewed federal interest in public transportation Rosemount had trouble funding Uniflo. A joint effort with Northrup Corp. to win a Department of Transportation (DOT) contract for a demonstration mass transit system at Dulles International Airport failed. The DOT passed over the Uniflo project for more conventional mass transit systems. Uniflo later received two other federal research grants but made no sales. The project, which was abandoned in 1973, cost Rosemount about $1 million.

Rosemount did have one successful spin-off from its main concern in those early days. The company’s rapid growth had left it with a space crunch, but the owners could not afford to buy themselves office cubicles. So Frank Werner assembled panels from lumberyard hollow-core doors and molded casings. The office partitions worked so well the company decided to begin selling them. In 1966 Rosemount created a subsidiary, Rosemount Partitions Inc., to manufacture the movable office partitions called “Rotopanels.” They later expanded into desks, storage areas, and other office furniture. But Rosemount’s other efforts to reduce its dependency on the U.S. space and defense programs proved to be the most profitable. In the late 1960s it had devised a plan to move temperature and pressure measurement instruments into areas of the industrial market which had a need for high accuracy measurement. It got off to a good start increasing industrial sales by 33 percent from 1969 to 1970. Heath said in a December 1972 Corporate Report Minnesota article, “We feel the financial results for fiscal 1972 are good indicators of the progress we are making in our carefully planned program of applying proven Rosemount technology to new markets.” The basic research which Rosemount used to develop space and defense technology was applied to products for commercial aviation, synthetic fiber, petrochemical, and nuclear and conventional power production needs. The company opened five new sales offices in Europe and three in the United States. New marketing efforts commenced in South America and Canada. Rosemount Engineering Company changed its name to Rosemount Inc. The company wanted to declare that it had expanded beyond its instrument engineering roots to become a producer and seller of engineering instruments on multi-industry and multi-national level. To cap things off, 1972 was the company’s first million-dollar profit year.

During the ten years from 1963 to 1973, Rosemount’s sales rose at a compound annual rate of 16 percent with earnings rising at a rate of 19 percent. It also expanded its facilities four times during that time period. By the end of its second decade, in 1975, sales were more evenly distributed between the defense, space, and commercial aviation market and the energy, process, and manufacturing market. In spite of an economic recession, Rosemount sales for fiscal year 1975 increased 26 percent to $41 million, and earnings per share were $3.30, up from $1.66 the previous year. International and export sales grew 42 percent and comprised over 25 percent of total sales. The company had more than 1,300 employees in the United States, Switzerland, West Germany, England, France, Denmark, Canada, and Japan. Rosemount’s earnings nearly doubled from 1974 to 1975, and its success cost the company its independence. In a March 1984 Star Tribune article Dick Youngblood wrote, “The response on Wall Street–down on small companies in general and wary of Rosemount’s tendency to veer into off-the-wall business–was to value the company’s stock at a peak of eight times earnings per share.” Takeover threats by billion-dollar corporations moved Heath to accept a friendly merger. Emerson Electric Co., a St. Louis-based $4 billion conglomerate with a reputation for giving autonomy to the companies it acquired, bought Rosemount Inc. in 1976 for $54 per share, double its trading level. Stockholders received $54 million in Emerson stock. Heath was named head of the consolidated aerospace and industrial control operations.

Rosemount, which was once referred to by Youngblood as “a small company with an impressive talent for making space-age sensing instruments–and an absolute genius for diluting that effort with unrelated, unprofitable ventures,” had a new image by the early 1980s. Rosemount was no longer small nor diverted by technological challenges like PRT systems and ski boots. Aerospace know-how had been balanced by industrial acumen. Rosemount’s 1983 revenues, which had been consolidated with Emerson’s, were estimated to exceed $250 million. Operating profits were about $50 million, and return on assets was between 18 and 20 percent. By 1985 government contracts had been reduced to 20 percent of sales. Although Rosemount clearly had moved the majority of its business into the industrial segment its products still had an important presence in the U.S. space effort. The first “reusable-returnable” space craft, the space shuttle, relied on Rosemount instruments. A pair of Rosemount sensors assisted pilots with determining the shuttles’s angle of re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. Other sensors in the shuttle’s rocket motor had a matter of seconds to response to temperatures changes of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit that occurred during the crucial launch phase. For Rosemount Inc. testing devises such as wind tunnels and environmental chambers were just tools of the trade. While Rosemount strived to apply the rigorous standards of the highly technical aerospace industry to the industrial market, Heath seemed equally committed to creating a atmosphere that fostered a committed and involved work force. Heath said in a 1985 Corporate Report Minnesota article, “For us, success is a matter of identifying common goals and establishing a culture that feeds itself and builds upon its.” People as well as profit were important to him, and that philosophy elevated Rosemount to a position among the world’s largest manufacturers of precision measurement and control instruments.

Rosemount revenues doubled over the five year period from 1983 to 1988 and reached the $500 million mark. Likewise, the employment figure nearly doubled in that time period to about 4,500 workers. Then in 1987 four Emerson instrument divisions were consolidated as the Rosemount Measurement and Control Instrumentation Group. The new group, which was managed by Heath, had 9,000 employees world wide and an estimated $1 billion in sales. Rosemount not only grew larger but continued improving its products. The company earned a place on the Fortune magazine “100 Products That America Makes Best” list in 1988–and again in 1991–for its “pressure transmitters for industrial power plants.” Rosemount, like many other international businesses, had its share of problems in the 1980s. United States trade sanctions short circuited a sales agreement with a French company for pressure transmitters. The Reagan administration had banned sales destined for a Soviet natural gas pipeline to Europe. Rosemount was concerned not only with the broken contract but with losing in market share and good will it had built up in Europe. Rosemount was also struggling in the Far Eastern markets. Rosemount-designed pressure transmitters were already being used in nuclear power plants in China, but Chinese government regulations and shortage of capital were inhibiting sales in that huge market. And in Japan a joint venture begun in 1975 was stalled by the company’s inability to crack through the Japanese distribution system. Despite roadblocks the consolidated Rosemount group entered the 1990s accounting for about one-sixth of Emerson’s total sales volume.

In 1991 Heath left his position as CEO but remained on as chairman. Rosemount revenues were about $1.1 billion at the time. Instrumentation-related acquisitions which were rolled into the company and the steady development and improvement of products facilitated Rosemount’s rapid growth. Rosemount consistently was its parent company’s greatest generator of stockholder value. In a move to further enhance its position in the process control market, Emerson purchased Fisher Controls International in 1992 for $1.25 billion. According to Emerson, the combined Fisher and Rosemount businesses created, “with one move, a marketing and technology leadership position in a $15 billion global industry.” Fisher’s strength was in control valve products and Rosemount’s in measurement instrumentation. Emerson expected the new division to make half its sales outside the United States. In 1993 Rosemount Inc. came under the scrutiny of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). A utility company engineer implicated Rosemount in a 1988 coverup of faulty transmitters in a Connecticut nuclear power plant. According to the engineer, Rosemount corrected the transmitter failure warning problem but pressured the utility to keep the problem quiet. Nuclear industry vendors are required to report problems with products. At the time, both Rosemount and Emerson officials declined to comment on the investigation, and the company was seeking to have the suit dismissed. Rosemount held more than 40 percent of the worldwide market for pressure transmitters. That same year a Rosemount facility was named one of “America’s 10 Best Plants” by Industry Week. The pressure transmitters produced in the plant, which was opened in 1990, were used to measure pressure in everything from oil pipelines and power plants to beer vats. Honeywell Incorporated, one of Rosemount’s largest competitors, also had a plant on the list.

Rosemount’s long-time relationship with the aerospace industry ended in 1993. Emerson sold the Rosemount Aerospace unit to B. F. Goodrich Company for $300 million in cash. The division, which manufactured aircraft temperature and pressure sensors, had sales of $130 million in fiscal year 1993, with 60 percent of that revenue from commercial and 40 percent from military aircraft. More employee layoffs, in addition to those related to the integration with Fisher, followed the elimination of the aerospace division. Another of Rosemount’s earliest divisions was sold in 1995. Vernon Heath, who had retired from his chairmanship position with Rosemount in 1994, bought Office Systems Inc. The office furniture business’s 1994 revenues were $20 million; the company had been profitable for nearly its entire existence. Rosemount Inc.’s history was one of transformations. From its aerospace roots, through misguided attempts at diversification, and finally success in the industrial marketplace Rosemount seemed like a classic American success story. In spite of ups and downs the company gravitated back to what it did best. Emerson had brought in money for research and capital equipment and improved asset management, but the company had remained much the same. But in the 1990s Emerson was moving towards consolidating its operations, and Rosemount Inc. went under another transformation. The company faced the 21st century identified as part of a process control system division, rather than as an independent manufacturer. Whether this would have an impact on its future remained to be seen.

Rosemount Engineering was founded in 1956 with a focus on the aerospace industry growing rapidly under the expansion of the U.S. space program. In 1966, the company diversified its customer base by targeting not only government agencies, but also the commercial processing industry.  Rosemount Inc. is a subsidiary of Emerson Electric Company that manufactures and sells sensors that measure pressure, temperature, level, and flow. Its headquarters is located in Shakopee, Minnesota.

Company History:

Rosemount Inc., which began as a space-age engineering company, designs and produces measurement instrumentation for industrial applications. The complex sensors and transmitters the company manufacturers are critical components of sophisticated energy, process, and manufacturing facilities. Purchased by Emerson Electric Co. in 1976, Rosemount proved to be a top performer for the century-old company. Rosemount was integrated with another Emerson acquisition, Fisher Controls International, in 1992. The combined operations of Fisher and Rosemount represent the largest supplier of process control equipment in the world. Rosemount’s history is linked to the development of supersonic jet aircraft and the United States-Soviet Union space race. Dr. Frank D. Werner, a scientist and inventor, was involved in temperature and pressure sensor research at The Rosemount Research Center at the University of Minnesota when the U.S. Air Force asked him to manufacture the total temperature sensors he had developed for their high-performance aircraft. Werner asked Robert E. Keppel, an engineer at the aeronautical lab, and Vernon H. Heath, the business manager, to join him in the part-time project. With $8,000 in seed money the men incorporated Rosemount Engineering Company in 1956. They produced their first product in a building that had once been a chicken hatchery.

The total temperature sensors they produced could measure the air compression-caused heat which was generated during high speed flights. The technological breakthrough allowed test pilots to get precise readings on the speed of their prototype jets for the first time. The start-up company sold $30,000 worth of the sensors in their first year. The next year they had a full-time operation with 20 employees and sales of $196,000. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The United States responded by accelerating the pace of their own space program, and Rosemount’s sensors were soon in demand for deep space exploration applications.

Rosemount Engineering was a custom business in those early days. The government supplied the company with sensor specifications, and Rosemount would fabricate them. Nearly all its sensors were used in aircraft and missiles. Its products were technologically advanced and produced at low volumes and high labor costs; in 1960, 24 of the company’s 144 employees were engineers. Sales reached $1.5 million in 1960, but the owners still needed a $300,00 bank loan to keep going. Expansion costs associated with new products, such as low-pressure sensors, were outpacing sales. But revenues continued to rise steadily and reached $5.6 million by 1963 with earnings of $240,000. “By then we were also getting a little smug about our success,” said Vernon Heath in a March 1984 Star Tribune article. “We were innovative, we were growing, and we thought we could make anything happen if it involved technology.” The company made a stab at a consumer product line. It developed the first engineered, molded-plastic ski boot–which eventually found its way to a place in the Smithsonian Institution–but plagued the company with manufacturing problems and high costs. High performance aircraft and the space program continued to be the forces propelling the company forward in the 1960s. McDonnell’s Gemini, North American’s Saturn and Apollo, Martin’s Titan Series, General Dynamics F111, Lockheed’s C-141, Douglas’ DC9, Boeings’s 707, 720, and 727, and the European Supersonic Concorde all depended on Rosemount sensors. Rosemount celebrated the end of its first decade with sales of $8.5 million and a 19 percent increase in profits. By 1965 they had developed a British subsidiary, Rosemount Engineering Company Limited, which served the aircraft manufacturing market in England. Applications for temperature and pressure sensors were being expanded and associated equipment, such as airplane stall warning and ice detection systems, were added to the product line. But only seven percent of Rosemount sales were coming from the industrial market.

When Vernon Heath succeeded Werner as president of Rosemount Engineering Company in mid-1968, he faced changes in the industries it depended on for the vast majority of its sales. Heath attributed a 7.15 percent decrease in sales in 1969 to a shift in the defense industry. Net income had risen but only due to the sale of a manufacturing plant and the ski boot division. The ski boot line, which was sold to G. H. Bass & Co., had cost the company more than $2 million in losses. Undaunted, Rosemount rolled another high-tech project out and into a wholly owned subsidiary named Unifol Systems Co. Unifol was a computer controlled, air pressure levitated and propelled personal rapid transit (PRT) system. A Honeywell researcher, who had worked on and then purchased the rights for the project, interested Frank Werner in pursuing its development. Rosemount had hoped to fund the project with public financing or equity participation by another firm, but even with renewed federal interest in public transportation Rosemount had trouble funding Uniflo. A joint effort with Northrup Corp. to win a Department of Transportation (DOT) contract for a demonstration mass transit system at Dulles International Airport failed. The DOT passed over the Uniflo project for more conventional mass transit systems. Uniflo later received two other federal research grants but made no sales. The project, which was abandoned in 1973, cost Rosemount about $1 million.

Rosemount did have one successful spin-off from its main concern in those early days. The company’s rapid growth had left it with a space crunch, but the owners could not afford to buy themselves office cubicles. So Frank Werner assembled panels from lumberyard hollow-core doors and molded casings. The office partitions worked so well the company decided to begin selling them. In 1966 Rosemount created a subsidiary, Rosemount Partitions Inc., to manufacture the movable office partitions called “Rotopanels.” They later expanded into desks, storage areas, and other office furniture. But Rosemount’s other efforts to reduce its dependency on the U.S. space and defense programs proved to be the most profitable. In the late 1960s it had devised a plan to move temperature and pressure measurement instruments into areas of the industrial market which had a need for high accuracy measurement. It got off to a good start increasing industrial sales by 33 percent from 1969 to 1970. Heath said in a December 1972 Corporate Report Minnesota article, “We feel the financial results for fiscal 1972 are good indicators of the progress we are making in our carefully planned program of applying proven Rosemount technology to new markets.” The basic research which Rosemount used to develop space and defense technology was applied to products for commercial aviation, synthetic fiber, petrochemical, and nuclear and conventional power production needs. The company opened five new sales offices in Europe and three in the United States. New marketing efforts commenced in South America and Canada. Rosemount Engineering Company changed its name to Rosemount Inc. The company wanted to declare that it had expanded beyond its instrument engineering roots to become a producer and seller of engineering instruments on multi-industry and multi-national level. To cap things off, 1972 was the company’s first million-dollar profit year.

During the ten years from 1963 to 1973, Rosemount’s sales rose at a compound annual rate of 16 percent with earnings rising at a rate of 19 percent. It also expanded its facilities four times during that time period. By the end of its second decade, in 1975, sales were more evenly distributed between the defense, space, and commercial aviation market and the energy, process, and manufacturing market. In spite of an economic recession, Rosemount sales for fiscal year 1975 increased 26 percent to $41 million, and earnings per share were $3.30, up from $1.66 the previous year. International and export sales grew 42 percent and comprised over 25 percent of total sales. The company had more than 1,300 employees in the United States, Switzerland, West Germany, England, France, Denmark, Canada, and Japan. Rosemount’s earnings nearly doubled from 1974 to 1975, and its success cost the company its independence. In a March 1984 Star Tribune article Dick Youngblood wrote, “The response on Wall Street–down on small companies in general and wary of Rosemount’s tendency to veer into off-the-wall business–was to value the company’s stock at a peak of eight times earnings per share.” Takeover threats by billion-dollar corporations moved Heath to accept a friendly merger. Emerson Electric Co., a St. Louis-based $4 billion conglomerate with a reputation for giving autonomy to the companies it acquired, bought Rosemount Inc. in 1976 for $54 per share, double its trading level. Stockholders received $54 million in Emerson stock. Heath was named head of the consolidated aerospace and industrial control operations.

Rosemount, which was once referred to by Youngblood as “a small company with an impressive talent for making space-age sensing instruments–and an absolute genius for diluting that effort with unrelated, unprofitable ventures,” had a new image by the early 1980s. Rosemount was no longer small nor diverted by technological challenges like PRT systems and ski boots. Aerospace know-how had been balanced by industrial acumen. Rosemount’s 1983 revenues, which had been consolidated with Emerson’s, were estimated to exceed $250 million. Operating profits were about $50 million, and return on assets was between 18 and 20 percent. By 1985 government contracts had been reduced to 20 percent of sales. Although Rosemount clearly had moved the majority of its business into the industrial segment its products still had an important presence in the U.S. space effort. The first “reusable-returnable” space craft, the space shuttle, relied on Rosemount instruments. A pair of Rosemount sensors assisted pilots with determining the shuttles’s angle of re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. Other sensors in the shuttle’s rocket motor had a matter of seconds to response to temperatures changes of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit that occurred during the crucial launch phase. For Rosemount Inc. testing devises such as wind tunnels and environmental chambers were just tools of the trade. While Rosemount strived to apply the rigorous standards of the highly technical aerospace industry to the industrial market, Heath seemed equally committed to creating a atmosphere that fostered a committed and involved work force. Heath said in a 1985 Corporate Report Minnesota article, “For us, success is a matter of identifying common goals and establishing a culture that feeds itself and builds upon its.” People as well as profit were important to him, and that philosophy elevated Rosemount to a position among the world’s largest manufacturers of precision measurement and control instruments.

Rosemount revenues doubled over the five year period from 1983 to 1988 and reached the $500 million mark. Likewise, the employment figure nearly doubled in that time period to about 4,500 workers. Then in 1987 four Emerson instrument divisions were consolidated as the Rosemount Measurement and Control Instrumentation Group. The new group, which was managed by Heath, had 9,000 employees world wide and an estimated $1 billion in sales. Rosemount not only grew larger but continued improving its products. The company earned a place on the Fortune magazine “100 Products That America Makes Best” list in 1988–and again in 1991–for its “pressure transmitters for industrial power plants.” Rosemount, like many other international businesses, had its share of problems in the 1980s. United States trade sanctions short circuited a sales agreement with a French company for pressure transmitters. The Reagan administration had banned sales destined for a Soviet natural gas pipeline to Europe. Rosemount was concerned not only with the broken contract but with losing in market share and good will it had built up in Europe. Rosemount was also struggling in the Far Eastern markets. Rosemount-designed pressure transmitters were already being used in nuclear power plants in China, but Chinese government regulations and shortage of capital were inhibiting sales in that huge market. And in Japan a joint venture begun in 1975 was stalled by the company’s inability to crack through the Japanese distribution system. Despite roadblocks the consolidated Rosemount group entered the 1990s accounting for about one-sixth of Emerson’s total sales volume.

In 1991 Heath left his position as CEO but remained on as chairman. Rosemount revenues were about $1.1 billion at the time. Instrumentation-related acquisitions which were rolled into the company and the steady development and improvement of products facilitated Rosemount’s rapid growth. Rosemount consistently was its parent company’s greatest generator of stockholder value. In a move to further enhance its position in the process control market, Emerson purchased Fisher Controls International in 1992 for $1.25 billion. According to Emerson, the combined Fisher and Rosemount businesses created, “with one move, a marketing and technology leadership position in a $15 billion global industry.” Fisher’s strength was in control valve products and Rosemount’s in measurement instrumentation. Emerson expected the new division to make half its sales outside the United States. In 1993 Rosemount Inc. came under the scrutiny of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). A utility company engineer implicated Rosemount in a 1988 coverup of faulty transmitters in a Connecticut nuclear power plant. According to the engineer, Rosemount corrected the transmitter failure warning problem but pressured the utility to keep the problem quiet. Nuclear industry vendors are required to report problems with products. At the time, both Rosemount and Emerson officials declined to comment on the investigation, and the company was seeking to have the suit dismissed. Rosemount held more than 40 percent of the worldwide market for pressure transmitters. That same year a Rosemount facility was named one of “America’s 10 Best Plants” by Industry Week. The pressure transmitters produced in the plant, which was opened in 1990, were used to measure pressure in everything from oil pipelines and power plants to beer vats. Honeywell Incorporated, one of Rosemount’s largest competitors, also had a plant on the list.

Rosemount’s long-time relationship with the aerospace industry ended in 1993. Emerson sold the Rosemount Aerospace unit to B. F. Goodrich Company for $300 million in cash. The division, which manufactured aircraft temperature and pressure sensors, had sales of $130 million in fiscal year 1993, with 60 percent of that revenue from commercial and 40 percent from military aircraft. More employee layoffs, in addition to those related to the integration with Fisher, followed the elimination of the aerospace division. Another of Rosemount’s earliest divisions was sold in 1995. Vernon Heath, who had retired from his chairmanship position with Rosemount in 1994, bought Office Systems Inc. The office furniture business’s 1994 revenues were $20 million; the company had been profitable for nearly its entire existence. Rosemount Inc.’s history was one of transformations. From its aerospace roots, through misguided attempts at diversification, and finally success in the industrial marketplace Rosemount seemed like a classic American success story. In spite of ups and downs the company gravitated back to what it did best. Emerson had brought in money for research and capital equipment and improved asset management, but the company had remained much the same. But in the 1990s Emerson was moving towards consolidating its operations, and Rosemount Inc. went under another transformation. The company faced the 21st century identified as part of a process control system division, rather than as an independent manufacturer. Whether this would have an impact on its future remained to be seen.

PSINet, based in Northern Virginia, was one of the first commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) and was involved in the commercialization of the Internet until the company’s bankruptcy in 2001 during the dot-com bubble and acquisition by Cogent Communications in 2002.

It was founded on December 5, 1989 and officially began offering services, including limited for-profit access to the Internet, on January 1, 1990, becoming one of the first companies to sell Internet connectivity.

HISTORY

Founding

PSINet was founded in 1989 by Martin L. Schoffstall and by William L. Schrader, who initially funded the company through personal loans, including using credit cards and by selling the family car. It was initially known as Performance Systems International. In very late 1989, the company acquired NYSERNet assets and established an ongoing outsourcing contract with NYSERNet. NYSERNet, a non-profit research and education network serving New York State, had created one of the first regional Internet networks under Schrader’s and Richard Mandelbaum’s leadership and technical leadership from Schoffstall, Mark Fedor, and others. This acquisition gave PSINet commercial access to what would come to be known as the Internet.

Commercialization

Before 1990, the Internet had been largely funded by government agencies including DARPA (the original and still existing at that time, ARPANET), the National Science Foundation (NSF) for NSFNET, various U.S. federal agency networks such as the Department of Energy and NASA, and with grants to various regional networks including NSYERNet. Many of the stake-holders of the Internet of the 1980s were military, industrial, or academic researchers who were largely satisfied with the then current model of usage and governance. However, appropriate commercial usage policies were debated on such mailing lists as com-priv (commercialization and privatization of the Internet), within semi-public forums such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and included an investigation by the NSF’s Inspector General staff. This included an intense debate on the “settlement model” of the Internet which was worldwide and both public and private in scope.

The NSF’s appropriations act authorized NSF to “foster and support the development and use of computer and other scientific and engineering methods and technologies, primarily for research and education in the sciences and engineering.” This allowed NSF to support NSFNET and related networking initiatives, but only to the extent that that support was “primarily for research and education in the sciences and engineering.”[5] And this in turn was taken to mean that use of NSFNET for commercial purposes was not allowed.

At the time the National Science Foundation (NSF) believed in a settlement model based on usage, with payments or contributions based on how much data was sent or received, mirroring the public X.25 networks at that time. Such a settlement policy would allow research and education and commercial traffic to share a common network infrastructure without using NSF funds to support the commercial use. NSF in fact entered into an agreement with the non-profit Advanced Network and Services to allow commercial traffic through a for-profit subsidiary, ANS CO+RE (commercial plus research), subject to the conditions (i) that the NSFNET Backbone Service was not diminished; (ii) that ANS CO+RE recovered at least the average cost of the commercial traffic traversing the network; and (iii) that any excess revenues recovered above the cost of carrying the commercial traffic would be placed into an infrastructure pool to be distributed by an allocation committee broadly representative of the networking community to enhance and extend national and regional networking infrastructure and support.

PSINet through Schrader, Schoffstall, Rick Adams of UUNET, Mitch Kapor, and others waged an intense policy battle that the Internet needed a fixed access payment strategy to ensure that the ultimate utility of the Internet become available to all.

Initial public offering

PSINet eventually took venture capital investment from Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners, and Amerindo as a private entity to grow the company throughout the US and then outside of the country. On May 1, 1995, the initial public offering listed its shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange under symbol PSIX. It was the second Internet company to go public following Netscape Communications Corporation, developers of their eponymous web browser.

Growth

The company met with early success, capitalizing on the growing potential of the growing global network, an expansion in which the company played an active role. In 1991, PSINet, UUNET (AlterNet) and General Atomics (CERFnet) co-founded the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX), a trade association of Internet Service Providers. By 1995, the company had revenues of $32.9 million.

Pressured by increasing competition in the dial-up internet market, the company restructured in 1996 to focus on its commercial Internet business, selling its retail ISP accounts to MindSpring in June of that year, and began its expansion into Europe. Co-founder Schoffstall left the company that year. As a leader in the ISP arena, PSINet was frequently mentioned in trade publications for its accomplishments and reputation, some of it not flattering. For example, Interactive Week, a trade publication that covered the nascent Internet industry, mentioned the reputation of the PSINet sales force as being “Hitler Youth” because of its relatively young and inexperienced sales force and sales management which were very abrupt and inflexible with customers. In 1997, the company raised $1 billion in bond capital and undertook a series of rapid acquisitions, making 76 acquisitions between January 1998 and December 2000. Regional ISPs were a frequent purchase, and according to Congressional testimony by CEO Schrader, the company was by 1999 the largest independent facilities-based ISP in the United States, the second largest ISP in Japan, and had more than 500 points of presence around the world.

In an attempt to generate more brand recognition, in 1999 PSINet committed $100 million for naming rights of the Baltimore Ravens’ new stadium in Baltimore, Maryland. Following PSINet’s insolvency, naming rights were renegotiated and the stadium is now called M&T Bank Stadium.

The company’s largest acquisition came in March 2000 with the purchase for more than $1.3 billion in stock of Houston-based Metamor Worldwide, a consulting services conglomerate it purchased in an effort to become a “single-source provider” for IT outsourcing services. The company also invested heavily in its fiber-optic network, anticipating strong demand, and planned in early 2000 to invest $1.4 billion over three years to build to expand its services and operations.

Collapse

Despite its rapid growth and significant position in the commercial Internet services market, the company was never profitable. A management team of inexperienced, young people was replaced by a more seasoned team of professional managers from companies like MCI, but its acquisition spree was too overwhelming for them to manage, in addition to the executives with a voice based telecom background (circuit-switched) did not completely understand the nuances of a packet switched network. It was a popular stock with analysts during most of the dot-com boom because of its rapid revenue growth and aggressive expansion plans, but by 2000, PSINet was beginning to struggle. The company lost more than $5 billion in 2000 despite having close to doubled annual revenues to $995 million. Some analysts point to the Metamor acquisition as the turning point for the company, burdening it with the demands of integrating business operations while it was already struggling with significant debt from its earlier acquisitions, and facing a general slowdown in the computer services industry. However, the company had missed earnings estimates the year before, and was said to be looking to sell parts of its operation in late 1999.

A portion of it was spun out into the independent company, Inter.net, www.inter.net, which had presence in 14 countries and took over the consumer customer base. Many of the Inter.net subsidiaries have become part of other companies, such as green.ch in Switzerland, GMO in Japan, and Uniserve in Canada. Another portion, ShellTown, was sold to Saugus.net.

A wave of senior officers, including the company’s president, chief operating officer, and an executive vice president, departed the company in early 2001, and Schrader left his CEO job on April 30. In the internal email sent to staff announcing his departure he likened the company’s situation to a building in a lightning storm and, referring to his decision to resign as CEO, said “I am that lightning rod”. The company’s stock price plunged in response to the departures and to wider-than expected losses: the stock, which had traded as high as $60.94 a share in 2000 (after a split), closed at 18 cents in late March 2001.

Around the same time PSInet decided it no longer wanted to be in the DSL business, and was pushing customers to convert over to leased line service at a higher cost. Those who chose not to eventually had their service cut off without any notice. Upper management were involved in this process.

In May 2001, the company was delisted from NASDAQ because the company’s stock had traded below one dollar for 30 consecutive days. The company delayed filing its quarterly 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Finally, overwhelmed by debts in excess of $3.7 billion and with dwindling cash reserves, the company announced on June 1, 2001, that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection along with 24 of its US subsidiaries, and that four of its Canadian subsidiaries had filed for protection under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA).

Resellers for PSInet became listed creditors owed money by PSINet for their sales commissions in bankruptcy proceedings, eventually getting payouts, that were less than pennies on the dollar.

Most of the PSINet United States’s assets were acquired by Cogent Communications in April 2002. PSINet Canada was acquired by TELUS Communications. PSINet Europe was acquired by Interoute. Telstra Europe Limited acquired the UK business of PSINet Europe in 2004.

On October 18, 1986, Pyramid Technology Corporation registered the pyramid.com domain name, making it 29th .com domain ever to be registered.

Pyramid Technology Corporation was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range. It was based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California They also became the second company to ship a multiprocessor UNIX system (branded OSx), in 1985, which formed the basis of their product line into the early 1990s. Pyramid’s OSx was a dual-universe UNIX which supported programs and system calls from both 4.xBSD and AT&T’s UNIX System V.

Pyramid Technology was formed in 1981 by a number of ex-Hewlett-Packard employees, who were interested in building first-rate minicomputers based on RISC designs. In March 1995 Pyramid was bought by Siemens AG and merged into their Siemens Computer Systems US unit. In 1998 this unit was split, with the services side of the operation becoming Wincor Nixdorf. In 1999 Siemens and Fujitsu merged their computer operations to form Fujitsu Siemens Computers, and finally Amdahl was added to the mix in 2000. Pyramid Technology Corp. manufactures a 32-bit virtual memory super mini-computer for sale to engineering, scientific, and military applications. The company is engaged in the design, manufacture, marketing, and support of high-end, large-scale servers that deliver mainframe-class performance for the open enterprise client/server environment. The company is based in San Jose, California. Pyramid Technology Corp. was formerly a subsidiary of Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG.

Products

90x

The first Pyramid Technology series of minicomputers was released in August 1983 as the 90x superminicomputer, which used their custom 32-bit scalar processor running at 8 MHz. Although the architecture was marketed as a RISC machine, it was actually microprogrammed. It used a “sliding window” register model based on the Berkeley RISC processor, but memory access instructions had complex operation modes that could require many cycles to run. Many register-to-register scalar instructions were executed in a single machine cycle. Initially, floating point instructions were executed totally in microcode, although an optional floating point unit on a separate circuit board was released later. Microprogramming also allowed other non-RISC luxuries such as block move instructions.

Programs had access to 64 registers, and many instructions were triadic. Sixteen registers (registers 48 to 63) were referred to as “global registers” and they correspond to the registers of a typical CPU, in that they are static and always visible. The other 48 registers were actually the top of the subroutine stack. Thirty-two of them (0–31) were local registers for the current subroutine, and registers 32–47 were used to pass up to 16 parameters to the next subroutine called. During a subroutine call, the register stack moved up 32 words, so the caller’s registers 32–47 became the called subroutine’s registers 0–15. The return instruction dropped the stack by 32 words so return parameters would be visible to the caller in registers 32–47. The stack cache held 16 levels in the CPU and stack overflow and underflow was automatically handled by the microcode of the CPU. The programming model had two stacks, one for the register stack, and one for subroutine local variables. One grew up from a designated address in the middle of the address space, and the other grew down from the top of the user mode address space. The 90x could accommodate four memory boards, initially holding 1 MB each. This was considered to be a lot of memory at the time, but the RISC-like architecture resulted in bigger programs than earlier architectures so most machines were sold with the memory slots full. Fortunately, the 1 MB memory boards had RAM in sockets, so they could be upgraded to 4 MB units when bigger dynamic RAM devices became available shortly after the 90x’s initial release. The 90x competed with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX 11/780 which was the preferred platform for running UNIX in the early 1980s. The 90x processor benchmarked at roughly twice the speed of the VAX, and sold for about half the price. Pyramid was indirectly assisted by DEC’s reluctance to sell VAX machines without the VMS operating system, for which they charged a considerable amount of money. Many universities wanted to run UNIX rather than VMS, so Pyramid’s higher performance and lower price, coupled with artificial delivery delays or surcharges from DEC, helped them to make the risky decision to buy from a new manufacturer.

One of the 90x’s biggest advantages over the competition was its asynchronous serial port controller (the ITS or Intelligent Terminal Server) based on a 16-bit bit-slice processor. The ITS interfaced to 16 serial ports, and it could run them at very high speeds, using DMA to feed from daisy-chained output data blocks. A machine could have many ITSs installed, each one with its own I/O processor. Other machines at the time (including the 11/780) required CPU intervention every few bytes for interactive users, which added significantly to the system component of the CPU load. As a result, the 90x scored very well on benchmarks with a realistic amount of serial I/O. The disk and magnetic tape controllers were actually 16-bit third-party Multibus controllers fitted into a socket in a U-shaped bus-adapter board. Most early systems were delivered with the 470 MB Fujitsu Eagle disk drive and a slot-loading reel-to-reel streaming tape drive. The system also had an administrative processor (based on a Motorola 68000) that loaded the microcode from an 8″ floppy disk when the system was started. It was also able to run a suite of diagnostics over the system. It had a modem which allowed remote analysis by the manufacturer. The software run by the administrative processor was initially called the Totally Unrealistic Remote Diagnostic. This name was changed some years later. A minimal system was delivered in a single 19″ rack about 60″ high with the card cage in the bottom, the disk drive in the middle, the tape drive above it, then the 2 inch high control panel with a floppy disk drive and ignition key on the top. This was considered very compact at the time. At least one machine in Australia spend six months installed in a retired outdoor lavatory with an air-conditioner replacing the louvered window and the system console terminal sitting on top of the cabinet. Administration tasks were performed al-fresco. The only indicator on the control panel was an 8 segment bar graph LED display that displayed average CPU usage when the machine was running and a “Cylon Eye” pattern when the machine stopped unexpectedly. The machine was low enough that the console (a monochrome asynchronous terminal) could rest on top.

98x

The 90x was fairly quickly followed by the 98x which was identical except that the processor clock speed was increased to 10 MHz. In late 1985 Pyramid released its first SMP system, 98x, running at 7 MHz. Several machines in the series were released, from the 1-CPU 9815 to the 4-CPU 9845, over a period of years from 1985 to 1987. The fully loaded 9845 ran at about 25 MIPS, a respectable figure for the era, though not competitive with high-end supercomputers.

MIServer

Like many of the early multiprocessor vendors, Pyramid turned to “commodity” RISC CPUs when they started to become practical. Pyramid continued to use their own RISC design until the release of the MIServer S product line. Pyramid released a series of register window-based machines as a 9000 line follow on. These were known as the MIServer starting in 1989. They supported up to ten CPUs with performance of about 12 MIPS each. The MIServer was replaced in 1991/2 with the MIServerT and later followed up with the MIServer S and ES, Pyramid’s first R3000-based machine. The first machines in the series shipped with anywhere from 4 to 12 R3000s running at 33 MHz, with top-end performance around 140 MIPS. Later high-end MIServer ES machines had up to 24 CPUs, also at 33 MHz. The operating system for the MIPS based systems was DC/OSx, a port of AT&T System V Release 4 (SVR4).

Nile series

The release of the 150 MHz 64-bit R4400 led to the 2–16-CPU Nile series in late 1993. With each CPU capable of 92 MIPS, the Nile systems were true supercomputers. Their last product, the Reliant RM 1000, known internally as the Meshine, was just coming to market when Siemens bought them. The RM1000 was a massive parallel processing (MPP) computer. Each node ran its own instance of Reliant UNIX DC/OSx. This system had a two-axis mesh architecture. The RM1000 used software called ICF to manage the cluster interconnects. ICF went on to provide the cluster foundation in the PrimeCluster HA software which is still developed and available from Fujitsu Siemens.

Each compute node in the mesh used a single MIPS R10000 CPU, however enhancements to the RM1000 allowed for the NILE SMP machines to be included into the mesh as “fat” nodes. The compute nodes were physically installed in the HAAS-3 frames that shipped as drive arrays with the earlier Nile product. Each compute node controlled six SCSI disks as the primary controller and another six disks as a secondary controller. The frame with up to six compute nodes or four compute nodes and two Nile attach gateways was connected to neighboring frames with short ribbon cables. A HAAS-3 frame with compute nodes installed was called a cell. The cells locked together and could be stacked two high and end to end as far as space permitted. Four cells together were known as a ton and systems were referred to by the number of tons they contained. The largest mesh constructed at Pyramid was a test system containing 214 CPUs including four Nile SMP nodes. Although the RM1000 was eventually discontinued and not replaced by Siemens, customers who had large installations such as a large UK telecommunications company took a long time to find suitable replacements for these massively parallel systems due to their massive I/O and computing capabilities.

On October 27, 1986, Raytheon Company registered the ray.com domain name, making it 30th .com domain ever to be registered.

The Raytheon Company is a major U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation with core manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military and commercial electronics. It was previously involved in corporate and special-mission aircraft until early 2007. Raytheon is the world’s largest producer of guided missiles.

Company History:

Raytheon Company is the third largest defense contractor in the United States, trailing only the Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation. Among the company’s key defense products are missile defense systems, including the Patriot and Hawk ground-based missile systems; offensive missiles, including the Tomahawk, TOW, and Stinger; and radar, infrared, and other electronic systems for surveillance, reconnaissance, targeting, navigation, and other purposes. Raytheon has pioneered in the conversion of defense technologies into commercial products handled by Raytheon Commercial Electronics, such as marine electronic equipment, broadband wireless communications products, and infrared night vision systems for automobiles. Raytheon Aircraft Company is the number one maker of business and special mission aircraft in the world; this subsidiary, however, had been placed up for sale in 2000. The sale of the company’s aircraft unit would complete a divestiture program launched in the late 1990s that transformed Raytheon from an industrial conglomerate to a company focused solely on defense and commercial electronics.

Beginnings in Radio Tubes

Raytheon was founded in 1922 when a civil engineer named Laurence Marshall was introduced to an inventor and Harvard physicist named Charles G. Smith by Dr. Vannevar Bush. Marshall proposed a business partnership with Smith and Bush after hearing that Smith had developed a new method for noiseless home refrigeration using compressed gases and no moving parts. Marshall raised $25,000 in venture capital from investors and a former World War I comrade and incorporated the partnership in Cambridge, Massachusetts (near Bush’s employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), as American Appliance Company.

Marshall and Smith never developed their refrigeration technologies for the market, but instead shifted their attention to vacuum tubes and other electronic devices. In 1924 Marshall made a three-month tour of the United States to study the pattern of growth in the electronics market. Noting rapidly growing consumer demand for radios, Marshall negotiated the purchase of patents for the S-tube, a gas-filled rectifier that converted alternating current (AC) used in households to the direct current (DC) used in radio sets (ironically, the technology had been developed by Smith and Bush some years earlier while they worked for the American Research and Development Corporation). Up to that time, radios ran on an auto storage battery called the A battery and a high-voltage B battery, which were costly, cumbersome, messy, and relatively expensive to replace.

In 1925, shortly before S-tube production began, a firm in Indiana laid claim to the American Appliance company name. The partners decided to change their corporate moniker to Raytheon Manufacturing Company. Despite the fact that raytheon is Greek for ‘god of life,’ the name actually was chosen for its modern sound. By 1926, Raytheon had become a major manufacturer of tube rectifiers and generated $321,000 in profit on sales of $1 million. Virtually all the tubes produced by Raytheon were used in radio sets whose design patents were held by RCA. In 1927 RCA altered its licensing agreements with radio manufacturers to stipulate that the radios could be built only with new rectifier tubes (called Radiotrons) manufactured by RCA. Raytheon was, in effect, denied access to its markets. The company was forced to switch to the production of radio-receiving tubes, a field in which more than 100 companies were engaged in fierce competition.

Marshall’s response to operating in this difficult environment was to diversify. Raytheon acquired the Acme-Delta Company, a producer of transformers, power equipment, and electronic auto parts. Profits resulting from new products were immediately put back into research and development to improve products, particularly in industrial electronics and microwave communications. Marshall also sought the support of the National Carbon Company (a division of Union Carbide Corp.) during this difficult period. In 1929, National Carbon took a $500,000 equity position in Raytheon and held an option to buy the remaining portion of the company for an additional $19.5 million. National Carbon knew that Raytheon rectifier tubes had originally replaced its B battery business and also was convinced that its battery distribution would do well handling replacement tubes marked Eveready-Raytheon. Although the cooperative project was unsuccessful, National Carbon’s investment carried Raytheon through the Great Depression. National Carbon allowed its option to acquire Raytheon to lapse in 1938.

Moving into Defense Contracting During World War II

With world war looming in 1940, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorized the joint development of new radar technologies by American and British institutions. Through the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Raytheon was chosen to develop the top-secret British magnetron, a microwave radar power tube. The technology would provide the range and clearer images required for successful detection and destruction of enemy planes, submarines (when they surfaced), and German warships. The new device had more than 100 times the power of previous microwave tubes and was cited as one of the Allies’ top secrets. Britain, however, needed the United States’ manufacturing capacity. In June 1941 Raytheon also won a contract to deliver 100 radar systems for navy ships. Workers produced 100 magnetrons a day until plant manager Percy Spencer discovered a method, using punch presses, to raise production to more than 2,500 a day. Spencer’s ingenuity won Raytheon an appropriation of $2 million from the U.S. Navy for the construction of a large new factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. By the end of the war, Raytheon magnetrons accounted for about 80 percent of the one million magnetrons produced during the war. By 1944, virtually every U.S. Navy ship was equipped with Raytheon radar. The company became internationally known for its reliable marine radar. The company also offered complete radar installations, with the help of subcontractors, and developed tubes for the VT radio fuse, a device that detonated fired shells when it sensed they were near solid objects. Over the course of the war, Raytheon’s sales increased 55 times, from $3 million in 1940 to $168 million in 1945. Raytheon was fortunate to be involved in a high-growth area of defense industry. When the war ended, companies specializing in high-technology military systems suffered less from cuts in the postwar defense budget than aircraft or heavy-vehicle manufacturers, or shipbuilders. In large part as a result of the war, Raytheon emerged as a profitable and influential, but still financially vulnerable, electronics company.

During the spring of 1945 Raytheon’s management formulated plans to acquire several other electronics firms. As part of a strategy to consolidate independent component manufacturers into one company, in April the company purchased Belmont Electronics for $4.6 million. Belmont, located in Chicago, was a major consumer of Raytheon tubes and was developing a television for the commercial market. That October, Raytheon acquired Russell Electric for $1.1 million and entered merger negotiations with the Submarine Signal Company. Sub-Sig, as the company was known, was founded in Boston in 1901 as a manufacturer of maritime safety equipment, including a depth sounder called the fathometer. Sub-Sig manufactured a variety of sonar equipment during the war and, like Belmont, was a major Raytheon customer. When the two companies agreed to merge on May 31, 1946, it was decided that Sub-Sig would specialize in sonar devices and that Raytheon would continue to develop new radar systems. Despite Raytheon’s strengthened position as a result of the mergers, the company faced severe competition in both the sonar and radar markets from companies such as General Electric, RCA, Westinghouse Electric, and Sperry. Belmont, which planned to bring its television to market in late 1948, suffered a crippling strike during the summer and, as a result, lost much of its projected Christmas business. Unstable price conditions the following spring created further losses from which the subsidiary was, in large part, unable to recuperate.

Laurence Marshall, though a superb engineer, was generally regarded as a poor manager. His inability to effect positive changes within the company led him to resign as president in February 1948. The following December he resigned as CEO, but he remained chairman of the board until May 1950, when he resigned after failing to gain support for a proposed merger with International Telephone & Telegraph. Charles F. Adams, a former financial advisor who joined Raytheon in 1947, assumed Marshall’s responsibilities. The sudden resumption of military orders after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 greatly benefited Raytheon, as Defense Department contracts enabled the company to develop new technologies with initially low profitability. That year, a ‘Lark’ missile equipped with a Raytheon-designed guidance system made history when it intercepted and destroyed a Navy drone aircraft. Raytheon’s advanced research center, called Lab 16, was designed to develop the Sparrow air-to-air and Hawk surface-to-air missiles. Raytheon became a partner in Selenia, a joint venture with the Italian firms Finmeccanica and Fiat, which was established to develop new radar technologies. Raytheon’s association with Selenia afforded it an opportunity to work with the Italian rocket scientist Carlo Calosi. Raytheon’s Belmont operation was re-formed in 1954, but two years later all radio and television operations were sold to the Admiral Corporation. Raytheon continued, however, to develop new appliances, such as the Radarange microwave oven. In 1956 Charles Adams hired Harold S. Geneen, a highly innovative and dynamic manager, as executive vice-president. Three years later, however, Geneen left Raytheon to become chief executive of ITT. Richard E. Krafve (who once headed the Ford Motor Company’s Edsel project) enjoyed only a short tenure as Geneen’s successor; he disagreed frequently with Adams and was apparently unable to gain the respect of engineers. Thomas L. Phillips, manager of the Missile Division, replaced Krafve.

In 1956 and 1957, Raytheon and Minneapolis-Honeywell jointly operated a computer company called Datamatic. Raytheon soon sold its interest to Honeywell when Datamatic failed to compete effectively against IBM. Raytheon’s joint venture projects with Italian companies continued to expand, however. D. Brainerd Holmes, a former director of the American manned space flight program, joined Raytheon in 1963 to manage the company’s military business, reporting to Phillips.

Diversifying in the 1960s and 1970s

Raytheon’s top managers began to recognize weaknesses in the company’s organizational structure perhaps as early as 1962; Raytheon, they decided, had become too dependent on government contracts. So in 1964 Adams and Phillips, who had become chairman and president, respectively, conceived a plan that aimed to diversify the company’s operations. Raytheon acquired Packard-Bell’s computer operations and a number of small electronics firms. In 1965 Raytheon acquired Amana Refrigeration Company. Although Raytheon had invented the microwave oven 20 years earlier, it needed Amana to commercialize the technology. (Spencer had accidentally discovered microwave cooking in 1945 when a candy bar in his pocket melted as he stood near an operating magnetron tube; the company began selling commercial refrigerator-sized Radaranges in 1947, then five years later started selling, with limited success, expensive consumer models through a licensing deal with Tappan Stove Company.) In 1967 Raytheon helped launch a domestic revolution when it introduced the first countertop microwave under the Amana name, featuring 100 volts of power and priced at just less than $500. That same year, Caloric Corporation, a major manufacturer of gas ranges and appliances, was acquired as well. By the end of the decade, Raytheon had absorbed a number of additional companies, including the E.B. Badger Co., Inc., a designer and builder of petroleum and petrochemical plants; United Engineers and Constructors, a designer and builder of power plants; textbook publisher D.C. Heath & Company; and a geological survey company called the Seismograph Service Corporation.

Raytheon’s association with Selenia became strained in 1967. Raytheon’s directors concluded that its Italian partners were unwilling to reform the operations of Selenia and Elsi (a jointly operated electronics firm). They voted to sell Raytheon’s share of the companies to its partners and end their association with Calosi. Nevertheless, the defense department in 1967 selected Raytheon as the prime contractor for the new SAM-D surface-to-air missile. Renamed the Patriot in honor of the nation’s bicentennial, the missile entered full-scale production in 1976. Initially designed as a defense against high-tech aircraft, the Patriot was upgraded about ten years later with the capability to intercept and destroy short-range ballistic missiles. The goal of reducing Raytheon’s proportion of sales to the government from 85 percent to 50 percent was achieved on schedule in 1970. But, while Raytheon’s sales continued to rise, profits began to lag. Intracompany discussions determined that, with the exception of D.C. Heath, Raytheon should dispense with its marginally performing educational services units. In 1972, after several relatively small acquisitions, Raytheon purchased Iowa Manufacturing Company (later called Cedarapids, Inc.), a producer of road-building equipment. When Charles Adams retired as chair in 1975, Tom Phillips was elected the new chairman and chief executive officer. Brainerd Holmes was promoted to president. Raytheon’s financial performance during the mid-1970s was impressive: from 1973 to 1978 sales and profits grew at annual rates of 15 percent and 26 percent, respectively. Acquisitions in the latter years of the decade included Switchcraft, Inc., an electronics manufacturer, and Glenwood Range and Modern Maid gas range producers. The laundry products and kitchen appliance divisions of McGraw-Edison, which included the popular Speed Queen brand name, were added in 1979. The company’s retained earnings were placed in high-yielding money market accounts until needed to finance acquisitions.

In 1977 Phillips tried to acquire Falcon Seaboard, an energy resources company involved primarily in strip mining coal, but withdrew the offer when favorable terms could not be reached. Instead, Phillips entered into negotiations to acquire Beech Aircraft, a leading manufacturer of single- and twin-engine aircraft. Raytheon acquired Beech in February 1980 for $800 million. The new affiliate recorded annual losses in each of the ensuing seven years, finally turning a profit in 1988. At this time Raytheon’s business with the government consisted mainly of radar systems, solar systems, communications equipment, and the Hawk, Sparrow, Patriot, and Sidewinder missiles, all of which totaled less than 40 percent of Raytheon’s sales. Raytheon was now more widely exposed to commercial computer and consumer markets, but these markets had become unexpectedly competitive, leading Raytheon management to reconsider its trend of moving away from stable military contracts.

Raytheon’s Data Systems division, created in 1971 through the merger of the company’s information processing and display units, established a small market by manufacturing terminals for airline reservation systems. Raytheon failed, however, to integrate Data Systems effectively with a word processing subsidiary called Lexitron, which it acquired in 1978. As the computer products market expanded, Data Systems found itself unable to compete. After mounting losses, the division was sold to Telex in 1984. In January 1986 Raytheon acquired the Yeargin Construction Company, a builder of electrical and chemical plants, and the following October it acquired the Stearns Catalytic World Corporation, an industrial plant maintenance company. When Brainerd Holmes retired on May 31, 1986, as he reached the traditional retirement age of 65, he was succeeded as president by R. Gene Shelley, who himself retired in July 1989 and was replaced by Dennis J. Picard. Picard succeeded Tom Phillips as chairman and chief executive of Raytheon in 1990, and Max E. Bleck rose to president.

Focusing on Defense and Commercial Electronics: 1990s and Beyond

While other major defense contractors moved to convert to civilian interests in the wake of post-Cold War defense budget cuts, Raytheon planned to buttress its position within its four main business segments: defense and commercial electronics, aircraft products, energy and environmental services, and major appliances. In 1992, Picard announced a new five-year plan. Its goals included increasing foreign military sales from 20 percent to 40 percent of total defense revenues; doubling energy and environmental services’ $1.7 billion in sales; doubling Beech’s $1.1 billion in sales; and increasing appliance sales by 60 percent. The versatile Patriot missile–Raytheon’s single most important product in the early 1990s–was considered pivotal to an increase in the company’s overseas sales. From the end of the Gulf War until late in 1994, Raytheon received nearly $2.5 billion in orders for the missiles from overseas customers. The corporation’s environmental and energy service was consolidated to form Raytheon Engineers & Constructors International Inc. (RECI), one of the world’s largest engineering and construction groups, in 1993. The acquisitions of Harbert Corp., Gibbs & Hill, and key segments of EBASCO Services, Inc. that year were intended to help boost RECI’s annual sales. The corporate jet unit of British Aerospace plc also was purchased that year for $387.5 million. The acquisition helped expand Beech’s penetration of the business aircraft market. An extensive overhaul of the appliance segment, including downsizing, consolidation, and the 1994 acquisition of UniMac Companies, helped increase that division’s sales and profits. Raytheon, meantime, exited from the publishing field with the 1995 sale of D.C. Heath to Houghton Mifflin Co. for $455 million.

The end of the Cold War and the resulting defense budget cuts ushered in a wave of mergers and consolidations in the defense industry by the mid-1990s. Raytheon was a key participant in this trend and also worked to rationalize its defense businesses. In early 1995 the company created Raytheon Electronic Systems from the merger of its Missile Systems Division and Equipment Division. Later that year Raytheon acquired Dallas-based E-Systems Inc. for more than $2.3 billion, gaining a leading developer of military intelligence communications systems. In 1996 Raytheon added two of Chrysler Corporation’s defense businesses in a deal valued at about $475 million. The Chrysler units acquired were its Electrospace Systems operation, which was involved in satellite communications, secure communications, and electronic warfare systems; and its airborne-technologies operation, which modified commercial aircraft for use by the armed forces and by heads of state, often equipping the planes with high-tech signal-jamming and encoding equipment. Both of these units complemented the activities of E-Systems and, therefore, were consolidated into the newly named Raytheon E-Systems. Raytheon’s appetite was not yet sated, and in fact grew in 1997, when the company acquired the defense business of Texas Instruments Inc. for $2.9 billion in July and the defense business of Hughes Electronics Corporation, a subsidiary of General Motors Corporation, for $9.5 billion in December. The Texas Instruments deal brought to Raytheon a number of complementary operations, including laser-guided weapons systems, missiles, airborne radar, night vision systems, and electronic warfare systems. The Hughes defense unit was a leading supplier of advanced defense electronics systems and services. These latest acquisitions propelled Raytheon into the top three among defense contractors and into the top position in defense electronics. They also led to a marked increase in revenues, from $12.33 billion in 1996 to $19.53 billion in 1998. Following the completion of the Hughes transaction, Raytheon consolidated its defense businesses–Raytheon Electronic Systems, Raytheon E-Systems, and the Texas Instruments and Hughes units–into a new operation called Raytheon Systems Company. In connection with this restructuring and a smaller restructuring of Raytheon Engineers & Constructors, Raytheon took a $495 million restructuring charge in 1997 for a plan that by 1999 eliminated more than 14,000 jobs from the workforce and closed about 28 facilities in the United States. In December 1997, the company also created a new subsidiary called Raytheon Systems Limited, which was based in the United Kingdom and was formed to develop products for export from that country.

By this time it was clearly evident that Raytheon had made a marked shift in strategy, placing a greater emphasis on its defense businesses, alongside the commercial electronics applications that developed out of the defense operations. The divestment of additional noncore operations was further evidence of this trend, with the divestments also helping to hold down the company’s mounting debt load, which exceeded $10 billion by the end of 1997 thanks to the defense acquisitions. In 1997 Raytheon sold its home appliance, heating, air conditioning, and commercial cooking operations to Goodman Holding Co. for $522 million. That same year, the company sold its Switchcraft and Semiconductor divisions in separate transactions totaling $183 million. Divestments continued in 1998, including the sale of the firm’s commercial laundry business for $334 million. Operations now consisted of the defense units, Raytheon Commercial Electronics, Raytheon Aircraft Company, and Raytheon Engineers & Constructors. In December 1998 Daniel P. Burnham, a vice-chairman of AlliedSignal, Inc., took the helm at Raytheon as president and CEO. Picard remained chairman until August 1999, when Burnham took on that title as well. Late in 1999 Raytheon revealed that it had uncovered pervasive management and financial problems in its defense electronics operations that forced it to cut its earnings projections for the fourth quarter and all of 2000. The company was over budget or behind schedule on more than a dozen Pentagon contracts, and other projects, both in the United States and overseas, were being delayed at the contract stage itself, including several billion-dollar deals involving Patriot missiles. With earnings down, Raytheon would be unable to pay down its $9.5 billion debt as quickly as it hoped. For the year, net income stood at $404 million, less than half the $844 million figure of the previous year. Meantime, late in 1999 the company launched a further restructuring, with additional job cuts, the closure or amalgamation of ten plants, and a charge of $668 million. To flatten the organizational structure, Raytheon Systems Company was reorganized into several smaller units: Electronic Systems; Command, Control, Communication and Information Systems; Raytheon Technical Services Company; and Aircraft Integration Systems. On the positive side for 1999, Raytheon contracted with the United Kingdom to develop a $1.3 billion high-tech radar surveillance system called Airborne Stand-Off Radar. That year also saw the sale of the Cedarapids subsidiary for $170 million.

As it worked to fix the problems in its defense operations, Raytheon was awarded a couple more large contracts in August 2000. The U.S. Army awarded a joint venture partnership of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin a $1.24 billion production contract on the Javelin Antitank Weapon System, which the partners first began producing in 1997. In addition, Lockheed Martin selected Raytheon for the design, development, and manufacture of three radar systems for the Theater High Altitude Area Defense System, a $4 billion missile defense system contracted for by the U.S. Army. Raytheon’s portion of the project amounted to $1.3 billion. Meantime, Raytheon’s ongoing series of divestitures were nearing their conclusion. In July 2000 Raytheon Engineers & Constructors was sold to Morrison Knudsen Corporation for more than $800 million. Later in the year it was reported that Raytheon Aircraft Company was being shopped around. The sale of the aircraft unit essentially would focus Raytheon exclusively on defense and commercial electronics. Once again, these further divestments were in part aimed at slashing the burdensome debt load, which had crept back up over the $10 billion mark by late 2000. Raytheon would need to rein in this debt load and clear up its other financial problems if it wished to return to or surpass the steadily, if unspectacularly, profitable years that preceded the major 1997 acquisitions.

Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) first operated the domain name system (DNS) registry under a sub-contract with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in September 1991. NSI gave out names in .com, .org, .mil, .gov, .edu and .net for free, along with free Internet Protocol (IP) address blocks. This work was performed at the Chantilly offices of GSI, the primary contractor, a corporation formed by Infonet to avoid foreign ownership of U.S. government contracts. The Network Information Center at SRI International had performed the work under Elizabeth J. Feinler since 1972.

In 1992, NSI was the sole bidder on a grant from the National Science Foundation to further develop the domain name registration service for the Internet. In 1993, NSI was granted an exclusive contract by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be the sole domain name registrar for .com (commerce), .net (network) and .org (organization) Top Level Domain (TLD) names, a continuation of work NSI had already been doing. NSI also maintained the central database of assigned names called WHOIS. A contract was given to Boeing to operate the .mil registry, and was also performed by NSI under subcontract.

In 1995, the National Science Foundation gave Network Solutions authority to charge for domain name registrations. Network Solutions charged $100 for two years registration. The fee was imposed on all domains and 30% of this revenue went to the NSF to create an “Internet Intellectual Infrastructure Fund.” In 1997, a lawsuit was filed charging Network Solutions with antitrust violations with regard to domain names. The 30% of the registration fee that went to the NSF was ruled by a court to be an illegal tax. This led to a reduction in the domain name registration fee to $70.

In the 1990s, Network Solutions implemented a policy of censoring domain names. This came to light when Jeff Gold attempted to register the domain name shitakemushrooms.com but was unable to. Further aggravating the controversy was Network Solutions’ automated screens blocked the registration of shitakemushrooms.com, though the domain name ‘shit.com’ had been successfully registered. Network Solutions argued that it was within its First Amendment rights to block words it found offensive, even though it was operating pursuant to contract with a Federal agency.

Network Solutions’ $100 charge, which many parties believed was excessive, in addition to its monopoly position in the market, was one of the contributing pressures that resulted in the creation of the International Ad Hoc Committee and its failed attempt to take control of the domain name system, and to the US Department of Commerce, NTIA releasing the White Paper and ultimately contracting with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to administer the DNS.

With the formation of ICANN in 1998, the domain name industry opened up to partial competition, with NSI retaining its monopoly on .com, .net and .org but having to recognize a separation of registry, which manages the underlying database of domain names, and registrar, which acts as a retail provider of domain names. To achieve this separation, NSI created a “firewall” between the two new divisions of the business, creating separate technical infrastructure, organizations, and facilities. By the end of 1999 the fee for registration had been reduced, from $34.99, to a wholesale rate of $6 per year to registered resellers.

In August 2009, Network Solutions notified customers that its “secure” servers were breached, and led to the exposure of names, address, and credit card numbers of 573,928 people who made purchases on Web sites hosted by the company. Susan Wade, a spokesperson for Network Solutions, said, “We really feel terrible about this.” At the time of this writing, NSI does not know how their servers were compromised.

One year later in August 2010, Network Solutions discovered that one of their widgets offered to their domain registration and hosting customers was capable of distributing malware by sites displaying it. As many as 5,000,000 of their registered domains may have been affected by the hack. The affected widget was at least temporarily addressed by Network Solutions, who were able to make changes to the code to prevent it from loading.

Directory and Database Services would be provided by AT&T

AT&T announced today that it has signed a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation to provide directory and database services for NSFNET, the National Science Foundation national data network that is part of the Internet. The Internet is comprised of more than 5,000 computer networks that facilitate collaboration among members of the research and education community. The Internet, and in particular NSFNET, is projected to serve as a basis for evolution to the National Research and Education Network (NREN).

Under the terms of the agreement, AT&T will develop and maintain a Directory of Directories which will serve as a pointer to numerous resources on the Internet. It will include lists of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, lists of various types of servers available on the Internet, lists of white and yellow pages directories, library catalogs and data archives. The Directory of Directories will enable even novice users to obtain references to information they need through simple, easy-to-use interfaces. AT&T also will provide white and yellow pages type directory services, such as names of users, organizations and resources on the Internet, using X.500 technology, the current standard specification for distributed information storage and retrieval.

As part of its database services, AT&T will establish database servers to extend and supplement the resources of the NSFNET, including databases of contributed materials of common interest to the user community and communications documents. AT&T also will offer database design, management and maintenance services to organizations and groups for inclusion in the Inter- net. Initially, access to all services will be provided through several currently popular in-use interface methods; with time, it is anticipated that X.500 will become the primary method of access.

In providing these services, AT&T will work cooperatively with two other organizations: CERFNet, a General Atomics project, which was awarded a similar agreement for information services, and with Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI), which was awarded a similar agreement for registration services. The three corporations will collaborate under a common concept called IN-

TERNIC.

“We all feel intuitively that the domestic Internet and the distributed collaboration that it facilitates are rapidly creating a national ‘workplace without walls,’” said Steve Wolff, Director, Division of Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure, NSF. “These three awards to geographically dispersed organizations for Network Information Services will both exploit and demonstrate the success of the network in enabling distributed collaboration.” “These directory and database services are essential components of the emerging national information infrastructure,” said Erik Grimmelmann, Marketing Director, Internet/NREN, AT&T Data Communications Services.

“This agreement marks an important step for the Internet as well as for AT&T because services such as these and the related ones to be provided by our INTERNIC collaborators will make the Internet even more useful than it is today.” The cooperative agreement is for a five-year period, with annual reviews. It is expected that the NSF will contribute ap- proximately one third of the costs, with another third provided by AT&T and the remainder recovered in user fees. The user fees, which have been proposed for maintenance of special databases and extensive directory listings, are consis- tent with Federal Networking Council (FNC) cost recovery guidelines.

The user fees were part of AT&T’s proposal, which was evaluated by an NSF review panel and approved by the NSF. The full text of the NSF statement on INTERNIC user fees is included at the end of this release. The agreement is a natural extension of AT&T’s strong commitment to education, research and the advancement of high-speed data networking. For example, AT&T operates XUNET (Experimental University Network), a high speed experimental research network for the academic community, and is a key participant in the CNRI (Corporation for National Research Initiative) sponsored BLANCA gigabit testbed. AT&T also supports collaborative applications research projects of direct relevance to the Internet, including an information retrieval service, an image retrieval service and a newly developed directory concept called “nomenclator” that has been shown to improve response time tremendously when searching large directories.

Information Services would be provided by General Atomics

General Atomics is a defense contractor headquartered in San Diego, California, specializing in nuclear physics. General Atomics’ research into nuclear fission and nuclear fusion has also had bearing on related technologies, allowing the company to expand into other fields of research and manufacturing. General Atomics develops systems[clarification needed] ranging from the nuclear fuel cycle to remotely operated surveillance aircraft, airborne sensors, advanced electric, electronic, wireless, and laser technologies.

1993: Awarded the “Information Services” portion of the NSF contract for InterNIC functions and publishes Internet Scout Report.

As the early ARPANET grew, hosts were referred to by names, and a HOSTS.TXT file would be distributed from SRI International to each host on the network. As the network grew, this became cumbersome. A technical solutioncame in the form of the Domain Name System, created by Paul Mockapetris. The Defense Data Network—Network InformationCenter (DDN-NIC) at SRI handled all registration services, including the top-level domains (TLDs) of.mil, .gov, .edu, .org, .net, .com and .us, root name server administration and Internet number assignments under a United States Department of Defense contract. In 1991, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) awarded the administration and maintenance of DDN-NIC (managed by SRI up until this point)to Government Systems, Inc., who subcontracted it to the small private-sector Network Solutions, Inc.

The Defense Data Network Network Information Center (DDN-NIC) at SRI handled all registration services, including the top-level domains mil, gov, edu, org, net, com and us. DDN-NIC also performed root nameserver administration and Internet number assignments under a United States Department of Defense contract starting in 1984.

By the 1990s, most of the growth of the Internet was in the non-defense sector, and even outside the United States. Therefore, the US Department of Defense would no longer fund registration services outside of the mil domain.

The National Science Foundation started a competitive bidding process in 1992; subsequently, in 1993, NSF created the Internet Network Information Center, known as InterNIC, to extend and coordinate directory and database services and information services for the NSFNET; and provide registration services for non-military Internet participants. NSF awarded the contract to manage InterNIC to three organizations; Network Solutions provided registration services, AT&T provided directory and database services, and General Atomics provided information services. General Atomics was disqualified from the contract in December 1994 after a review found their services not conforming to the standards of its contract. General Atomics’ InterNIC functions were assumed by AT&T.

Research in Motion Ltd. is known primarily as the maker and provider of BlackBerry wireless devices and e-mail services. These always-on devices have proven popular with corporations who use them for field service representatives and other mobile employees. BlackBerry’s service delivers e-mail messages from corporate servers to handheld BlackBerry devices. Some models also have voice capabilities and can function as cell phones. Other advanced features include the ability to visit specific web sites and conduct Internet searches. In addition, BlackBerry devices include other features common to personal digital assistants (PDAs), including calendars and organizers. In addition to wireless handheld devices, RIM also provides radio modems to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and software development kits for creating applications for BlackBerry Wireless Handhelds.

Research In Motion (RIM) had a modest beginning with an ambitious vision. Today, more than 20 years later, that ambition and vision has translated into success. RIM is one of the world’s leading designers, manufacturers and marketers of solutions for the mobile communications market. Through development and integration of hardware, software and services, RIM’s portfolio of award-winning products now includes the BlackBerry® wireless platform, the BlackBerry Wireless Handheld™ product line, software development tools, radio-modems and software and hardware licensing agreements.

Early History: 1984-90

Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM) was founded in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario, by Mike Lazardis. Lazardis, the son of Greeks who immigrated to Canada from Turkey in 1967, was 23 at the time. He had recently dropped out of the University of Waterloo, where he was studying electrical engineering. Backed by loans from friends and family, Lazardis and two friends started RIM. The company’s first contract came from General Motors of Canada Ltd. for industrial automation. For several years the company survived by moving from contract to contract. By the late 1980s RIM had about $1 million in sales and about a dozen employees.

Developing Digital Wireless Systems: 1990s

RIM became interested in the long-term potential of digital wireless devices after it received a contract in 1987 from Rogers Cantel Mobile Communications, Inc., a paging and cellular telephone operator that was a subsidiary of Rogers Communications Inc. The contract required RIM to investigate the potential of newer wireless digital network systems being developed by Sweden’s LM Ericsson. RIM was soon manufacturing tiny wireless radio modems. By the mid-1990s these modems were being used by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in products ranging from computers to vending machines.

By 1991 RIM was developing software to support a complete wireless e-mail system. The company was part of a three-way partnership with Ericsson GE Mobile Data Inc. and Anterior Technology that was formed to develop the system. In January 1992 Ericsson introduced its first portable radio modem, which was designed for Hewlett-Packard Co.’s palmtop computer. Anterior Technology was to provide a gateway to major e-mail systems, and RIM provided the application programming interface (API). RIM’s API, called MobiLab-Plus, would be used to develop e-mail packages with Anterior Technology. RIM noted that by using radio packet technology instead of cellular networks, the network could determine the optimum time to send an e-mail message. The system, which was still being developed, featured uninterrupted connectivity.

Realizing that he was better at engineering than corporate finance, Lazardis hired James Balsillie in 1992 to handle the company’s finances and business development. Balsillie was a chartered accountant with an M.B.A. from Harvard University. He previously held executive positions with Ernst & Young in Toronto and with Sutherland-Shultz Ltd. Balsillie subsequently became RIM’s chairman and co-CEO with Lazardis.

In the early 1990s RIM also produced a software developer’s kit (SDK) for adding wireless connectivity to Windows 3.x applications. In 1995 RIM released version 2.5 of the SDK, which was called RAD I/O Connectivity Tools. The core of the SDK was a protocol that acted as an interface to RAM Mobile Data network, which was a two-way wireless data-packet network compatible with radio modems produced by IBM, Ericsson GE Mobile Communications Inc., and Motorola. The SDK’s protocol handled all communications setups between Windows applications and Mobitex, the name of RIM’s networking software. In 1996 RIM released a PCMIA plug-in card for computers that enabled wireless e-mail.

By 1996 manufacturers were beginning to focus on developing smart pagers that would utilize packet-based networks to provide wireless Internet access. RIM initially announced it had two such pagers in development for commercial release in 1997, one for the RAM Mobile Data wireless network and another that was compatible with Ardis Co.’s wireless network. RIM’s pocket-sized smart pages would let users exchange pages, e-mail, and Internet messages via either network. Other companies developing similar smart pagers included NEC America Inc. and Motorola.

When RIM introduced its Inter@ctive pager in September 1996 at the PCS ’96 trade show in San Francisco, the pager was able to use both the Ardis and RAM wireless networks. An innovative two-way messaging device, the Inter@ctive pager featured a QWERTY keyboard and a small, text-only display screen that showed four lines of text. It was developed jointly with Intel Corporation and included a 16-bit operating system along with built-in contact manager, scheduler, and forms-based messaging applications. With service provided by Ardis Co. and RAM Mobile Data USA L.P., the Inter@ctive pager could send and receive messages and had its own Internet address. The handheld device could also store 100KB of data and had a variety of pre-programmed response messages, such as “I’ll be late.” The list price for the Inter@ctive pager was about $675, not including service fees.

Released commercially in 1997, the Inter@ctive pager quickly became RIM’s best-known product. By early 1998 the company had signed a contract to supply IBM with Inter@ctive pagers for use by its field service representatives across North America. Other customers included Panasonic Corp., Mobile Integrated Technologies, and Telxon Corp.

RIM completed its initial public offering during fiscal 1998. The company’s stock was traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. For 1998, RIM reported revenue of US$21 million and net income of US$400,000. The company was in good financial shape. It had C$100 million worth of backlogged orders and C$109 million of cash and short-term investments. It planned to use about half of its cash on new equipment, sales and marketing, research and development, and as working capital. The company planned to use 10 to 15 percent of its sales revenue toward research and development.

Near the end of 1998 RIM introduced an upgraded version of its Inter@ctive pager. The 950 model was smaller, cheaper, and had a longer battery life than its predecessor, the 900 model. The 950 could send and receive e-mail, pages, and peer-to-peer messages as well as send faxes and text-to-voice messages. The Inter@ctive pager 950 was priced at $249, with service from BellSouth Wireless Data L.P. available for $25 per month. At the PCS ’98 trade show in Orlando, RIM and Bell South Wireless Data announced they were working together with Sybase to develop a mobile enterprise solution that extended critical business applications to a two-way pager. The solution included the RIM Inter@ctive pager 950 and Sybase’s UltraLite, a smaller version of its Adaptive Server Anywhere mobile database. The solution enabled corporate users to download and upload data on demand from their pagers.

Popularity of RIM’s BlackBerry: 1999

Sensing that the time was right for corporate e-mail appliances, RIM introduced the BlackBerry mobile e-mail solution in February 1999. The BlackBerry included a wearable wireless handheld device with service initially provided by BellSouth’s wireless network in the United States and Cantel AT&T wireless data network in Canada. A unique aspect of the BlackBerry was that it featured a push system for e-mail delivery, whereby e-mail messages were relayed from the user’s personal computer or corporate server to the BlackBerry without having to dial in. The BlackBerry was an always on, always connected product that never had to be turned off. At its introduction a BlackBerry subscription package was priced at $399 with a monthly service charge of $40. Around this time RIM introduced the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, an optional add-on server that allowed e-mail to be redirected from the server rather than the desktop.

Reviews that compared the BlackBerry with 3Com’s just-released Palm VII PDA noted two key differences aside from the fact that the Palm VII cost $599 compared to $399 for the BlackBerry. The BlackBerry had to be left on at all times, as did the user’s personal computer or corporate server, while the Palm had an antenna that had to be raised to work. Another key difference was that the BlackBerry notified users of new messages, while the Palm VII did not. Both products included an address book, calendar, task list, and alarm clock features.

For 1999, RIM’s revenue more than doubled to US$47.5 million. Net income was US$6.8 million. During the second half of 1999 RIM announced that several operators were offering RIM messaging solutions. In the United States RGN Corp. became the first Internet service provider (ISP) to offer the BlackBerry wireless e-mail solution to subscribers. GoAmerica Communications Corp. announced its support of e-mail access for the Inter@ctive 950 pager and BlackBerry service. Internationally, Venezuela-based Telcel Cellular became the first Mobitex operator in Latin America to offer a messaging solution using RIM’s Inter@ctive 950e pager, which was the Spanish-language version of the Inter@ctive 950.

RIM also faced a few challenges in 1999. In August competitor Glenayre Technologies Inc. filed a patent infringement suit against RIM regarding a patented process involving power generation from a dual battery source. Glenayre claimed that RIM’s Inter@ctive pager line used this patented process. In another development BellSouth delayed contract renewal negotiations with RIM. As a result RIM had to report lower-than-expected quarterly earnings. RIM’s Inter@ctive pagers were contributing about 70 percent of the company’s revenue, and BellSouth was the largest customer for those devices. However, new customers were being signed up, including American Mobile Satellite Corp. and Paging Network Inc. In addition, RIM signed a distribution agreement with Dell Computer whereby Dell account executives would sell BlackBerry devices to large corporate accounts. News of the distribution agreement helped boost RIM’s stock price to more than C$80 per share by the end of 1999, up from C$46.20 on November 1.

New Competitors, Leading to Upgrades: 2000

RIM’s BlackBerry enjoyed good reviews and was named Product of the Year by InfoWorld, which said, “The BlackBerry wins hands down when it comes to easy and timely access to e-mail messages.” In January 2000 RIM and Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel entered into a joint marketing and product development agreement, which included a $25 million investment in RIM by Nortel. It was expected that the joint agreement would lead to making RIM’s Inter@ctive pagers and BlackBerry service available in Europe. RIM also signed another agreement with Compaq Computer, which agreed to distribute RIM’s BlackBerry service to its corporate clients.

For 2000, RIM reported revenue of US$85 million and net income of US$10.2 million. In April 2000 the company received a C$34 million investment from the Canadian government under its Technology Partnerships Canada (TPC) program. Around this time RIM introduced the first of its Wireless Handheld products, the BlackBerry 957, priced at $149. It featured a larger screen than the BlackBerry 950, a 32-bit Intel 386 processor, five megabytes (MB) of Intel flash memory, keyboard, embedded wireless modem, integrated organizer, and full support for the BlackBerry wireless e-mail solution. RIM also upgraded the BlackBerry 950, giving it four MB of memory, and introduced version 2.0 of its BlackBerry software to support both the 950 and the 957.

By mid-2000 RIM’s BlackBerry service was hosted by numerous ISPs. The company had just signed a partnership agreement with America Online (AOL) to provide AOL Mail and AOL Instant Messenger service through RIM handheld devices. While Palm, Inc.’s line of PDAs held the largest market share, RIM was doing well serving the niche market of professionals who required mobile access to business-related e-mail. RIM had about 200,000 BlackBerry units in use, with about 50,000 of them at corporations. Other competitors included Motorola and OmniSky, and in the second half of 2000 Handspring Inc., a new company formed by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins.

By the end of 2000 RIM had released the AOL Mobile Communicator as part of its agreement with AOL. The device–part of AOL’s new “AOL Anywhere” strategy–was a two-way pager that let users access AOL e-mail and instant messaging services. In other developments the company teamed with Certicom to provide secure transactions over its handheld devices, and it reached a new agreement with BellSouth Wireless Data to supply the company with 150,000 wireless handheld devices. BellSouth also agreed to offer the BlackBerry wireless e-mail solution to its corporate clients. In another development RIM licensed CDMA (code division multiple access) technology and patents from Qualcomm Inc., which allowed the company to expand its customer base to include wireless users on CDMA cellular and PCS networks.

In November 2000 Lazardis committed C$100 million to fund the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, starting with a C$20 million donation. It was the largest philanthropic gift in Canadian history.

Expansion of BlackBerry Service: 2001

In 2001 BlackBerry wireless e-mail service became more widely available in Europe. In April the British wireless service, BT Cellnet, committed to purchasing 175,000 wireless handheld devices and related software from RIM. Other agreements were signed with Esat Digifone in Ireland and Telfort Mobiel in the Netherlands to offer BlackBerry service.

RIM also expanded in the United States through agreements with companies such as IBM, which agreed to issue about 6,500 BlackBerry devices to its field-support staff and market the service to its customers. Vaultus, a wireless solution provider, agreed to supply at least 50,000 BlackBerry devices to its Global 1000 corporate customers over the next two years. RIM also took steps to target the U.S. military market. It reached an agreement with Kasten Chase to develop secure wireless access to the U.S. government’s Defense Messaging System, which had 300,000 users globally. The overall military market included more than two million defense personnel.

Throughout 2001 RIM added enhancements to its products. In January it introduced the BlackBerry Enterprise Edition server for Lotus Notes and Domino. Previously, the BlackBerry system worked only with Microsoft Exchange servers, which had about 58 million users. Lotus Notes and Domino servers had about 65 million users.

In March RIM introduced the BlackBerry Enterprise Server 2.1 at the CTIA Wireless 2001 trade show in Las Vegas. The new version enabled web access for BlackBerrys for the first time and also allowed users to send updated calendar information to and from their central system. At the same time the company announced an alliance with GoAmerica Communications Corp. that allowed wireless downloads. These enhancements moved RIM’s BlackBerry service significantly beyond wireless e-mail.

For 2001, RIM’s revenue more than doubled to US$221.3 million. However, increased operating expenses resulted in a net operating loss of US$4.7 million. The company’s overall net loss was US$7.6 million. For the year RIM reported it had nearly 164,000 BlackBerry subscribers in 7,800 companies. By the end of 2001 there were more than 12,000 organizations in North America using BlackBerry, according to Wireless Cellular magazine.

In May 2001 RIM filed a patent and trademark infringement complaint against competitor Glenayre Technologies Inc., claiming that Glenayre blatantly imitated BlackBerry technology and marketing. Around this time RIM also obtained a U.S. patent called the BlackBerry Single Mailbox Integration patent, which covered technology that gave users the ability to have a single e-mail address on both wireless and desktop systems. The patent applied to the system and method that RIM pioneered for redirecting information between a host computer system and a mobile communications device. Later in 2001 Glenayre’s 1999 patent suit against RIM was dismissed. In early 2002 RIM and Glenayre agreed to drop their lawsuits and work together to develop a wireless e-mail device that would incorporate Glenayre’s messaging software.

In other developments, RIM expanded its presence in the consumer market by supplying Earthlink Inc. with BlackBerry service for its mobile messaging platform. Cingular Interactive, a wireless service provider, was also selling RIM devices to the general public. AOL, meanwhile, dropped the price of its Mobile Communicator from $320 to $99.95. In the enterprise market, RIM signed an agreement with software developer SAP AG to provide wireless access to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. In October PeopleSoft became the first enterprise applications vendor to offer a secure wireless e-mail solution using BlackBerry in the European market. Following the terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C., and New York City on September 11, 2001, BlackBerrys were handed out to all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives as a security measure. BlackBerrys were also cited as providing much needed communications during the crisis, and in January 2002 it was reported that police officers at Boston’s Logan Airport were now equipped with BlackBerrys. By the beginning of 2002 RIM could boast that it had 250,000 BlackBerry subscribers among more than 12,000 companies.

Expanding Options, Entering New Markets: 2002-03

At the beginning of 2002 RIM announced that it was developing a wireless device capable of handling both voice and data communications. The new BlackBerry device was being developed in association with Nextel Communications Inc. and Motorola. An agreement with VoiceStream Wireless Corp. also laid the groundwork for the new generation of voice-enabled BlackBerry devices, which would run on VoiceStream’s GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service), instead of on RIM’s less advanced pager network. RIM also teamed with AT&T Wireless to offer AT&T Wireless’s corporate customers a BlackBerry that could place telephone calls over AT&T Wireless’s GSM/GPRS network. In Canada a similar agreement was reached with Rogers AT&T Wireless, which was developing its own GSM/GPRS network to reach more than 90 percent of all Canadians.

RIM’s new BlackBerry with phone service and always-on e-mail connectivity was introduced in March 2002. The BlackBerry 5810 could be purchased through network carriers, including AT&T Wireless, Voice Stream, and Cingular Wireless in the United States and Rogers Wireless and Microcell Telecommunications in Canada. Pricing was determined by the carriers, with VoiceStream offering the 5810 for $499 plus a monthly fee of $39.99 for the data package, which included one MB of web downloads. Voice service required a separate account. A similar device, the BlackBerry 5820, was being shipped to the European market. Around this time competitor Handspring launched its all-in-one communication device, the Treo.

With competitors releasing their PDA designs to manufacturers, RIM announced in April 2002 that it would make its BlackBerry designs available to OEMs and original device manufacturers (ODMs). RIM said it would provide consulting, interoperability testing and certification, and hardware and software blueprints. In addition, Analog Devices Inc., which supplied processors for RIM’s devices, agreed to provide participating manufacturers with integrated processors that supported both GSM/GPRS wireless communications and Java applications.

RIM’s expansion into European markets proceeded in 2002. In April the U.K. mobile operator Vodafone agreed to market BlackBerry wireless devices that operated over its GPRS network in the United Kingdom. In mid-2002 BlackBerry service was launched to corporate customers in Germany through an agreement with Deutsche Telekom, which had recently acquired U.S. wireless operator VoiceStream. Around this time BlackBerry service was also launched in France through an agreement with Vivendi Universal’s mobile subsidiary SFR, which operated a GPRS network, and in Italy through Telecom Italia Mobile. In January 2003 BlackBerry service was introduced in Spain through an agreement with Telefónica Móviles S.A. and in Switzerland through an agreement with Swisscom Mobile.

In July 2002 InfoWorld magazine announced the results of its Readers’ Choice Awards. RIM’s BlackBerry won four separate awards, including Product of the Year and Best Handheld for the BlackBerry 957 and Gadget of the Year and Best Wireless Product for the BlackBerry 5810. PC Magazine gave the BlackBerry 957 its Editor’s Choice Award for 2002. In another development RIM obtained a contract with the National Security Agency to provide it with customized BlackBerry devices that met the stringent security standards of governmental organizations.

RIM continued to add new product features, introduce new models, and partner with technology providers throughout 2002 and 2003. An agreement with BEA Systems Inc. called for the development of a framework to build web-based applications and services for BlackBerry devices. New software developed by Onset Technology Inc. enabled BlackBerry users to go to a specific web page or do a Google search without launching a browser. The software, called MetaMessage 4.0, also added network printing capabilities to the fax printing capabilities of earlier versions. Applications from providers such as Arizan Corp., Good Technology Inc., and Onset Technology enabled BlackBerry users to view e-mail attachments. An enterprise solution that made it easy to print from BlackBerry devices was developed in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard and Adobe Systems.

New BlackBerry models introduced in 2002 and 2003 included the 6710 and the 6720, which were Java-based and included an integrated speaker/microphone and delivered e-mail, phone, SMS, browser, and organizer applications. The BlackBerry 6510, which functioned as a walkie-talkie, was introduced by Nextel at the end of 2002, and Nokia announced it was developing a BlackBerry 6800 that functioned as a cell phone. In February 2003 RIM introduced a new, low-cost 6200 BlackBerry series that was designed to sell for about C$200. Comparable models, the 6210 and 6220, were launched for the European market. They were smaller than earlier BlackBerry versions but had more memory.

RIM continued to be involved in patent infringement suits in 2002. Good Technology, which developed and sold e-mail software that ran on BlackBerry devices, filed a defensive lawsuit against RIM in anticipation of being sued by RIM. RIM subsequently filed complaints against Good Technology as well as against competitor Handspring. In November RIM agreed to dismiss its suit against Handspring and license some of its keyboard patents to Handspring. In another development, RIM lost a patent suit brought against it by Chicago-based NTP, Inc., which held a patent that the court said was used to power BlackBerry devices. In early 2003 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced it would review the decision in NTP, Inc. vs. Research in Motion and re-examine five RIM patents.

Financially, 2002 was a difficult year for RIM. For the fiscal year ending March 2, RIM reported revenue of US$294.1 million, a 33 percent increase over the previous year. However, the company reported its second consecutive operating loss, which increased from $4.7 million to $58.7 million. Overall, RIM’s net loss was $28.3 million. At the beginning of fiscal 2003 RIM reduced its earnings estimates for the coming year, citing delays in carriers rolling out GPRS launches of their BlackBerry services. In November 2002 the company announced it would lay off about 10 percent of its workforce. Nevertheless, RIM CEO Jim Balsillie foresaw rising demand for wireless devices, and the company continued to announce new and enhanced wireless devices and services.

Righthaven’s domain name is sold for $3,300 to an unknown bidder, while more of its assets could be auctioned off to pay the company’s substantial debts.

Righthaven owns its creditors substantial amounts of money, creditors including Wayne Hoehn and his attorneys. Righthaven sued Hoehn for copyright infringement when Hoehn was found to have used portions of a newspaper article, but subsequently lost the case and now owns Hoehn and his attorneys more than $60,000 in legal fees.

Righthaven has already lots its domain name, righthaven.com, when a court appointed receiver put up the domain name for auction. The final bid was $3,300, to an as yet unknown bidder, money that will now be used to pay back Righthaven’s creditors.

Hoehn’s attorneys have suggested Righthaven should obtain a bond to cover any potential future claims against the first, but Righthaven say they are unable to get a bond and are out of money as well, despite still being able to pay for the legal fees associated with various appeals.

Righthaven.com’s online auction opened on Dec. 26 for $100 and ended Friday at $3,300. The auction is intended to help recoup $63,000 in legal fees Righthaven owes after it lost a case in which a federal judge said that reposting an entire news article in an online forum was fair use — an issue Righthaven has appealed.

The list of possible buyers isn’t known but one could imagine a civil liberties group loving to claim it as a trophy or perhaps more likely, a domain squatter guessing that all the negative links to the domain name might be turned into a little cash.

The domain auction was to help pay Las Vegas lawyer Marc Randazza for successfully defending Vietnam veteran Wayne Hoen against a Righthaven copyright lawsuit that sought large damages for posting the entirety of a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial to a small online message board. Randazza isn’t saying who bought the domain.

The Public Interest Registry announced that there are over 8 million domain names registered as .org, making it the third largest generic top-level domain.

In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the introduction of Internet domains, .ORG, The Public Interest Registry is pleased to announce that the trusted .ORG domain is now home to over 8 million registrations. With a growth of 8.4 percent in 2009, the domain has officially cemented its place as the world’s third largest generic Top Level Domain (gTLD), according to the organization’s bi-annual “Dashboard” report.

Between the first .org domain registration, mitre.org (July 1985), to the 8 millionth registration, the world experienced a revolution thanks to the Internet. In the meantime, .ORG similarly established itself as the very heart and soul of the Internet community, becoming the address of choice for a vast array of non-commercial sites, including associations, individuals, families, groups, cultural institutions, wikis and even corporate philanthropic efforts. Since the Public Interest Registry (PIR) took over the management of the .ORG domain in 2003, the organization has emerged as an outspoken leader in the Internet community, frequently advocating on behalf of users, proposing innovative policies to curb domain name abuse, and implementing technical upgrades necessary for the future growth and stability of the Internet. As a result of PIR’s efforts and enhanced standing within the Internet community, .ORG has grown from 2.7 million registrations in 2002 to over 8 million today.

“Hitting the 8 million registration mark is a testament to both .ORG’s reputation and value to the Internet,” said Alexa Raad, CEO of .ORG, The Public Interest Registry. “.ORG is managed with the community in mind, connecting users not only to valuable content but also to each other in order to leverage the power of the Internet for a higher purpose. It’s that open, community-driven aspect that has appealed to our users for the past 25 years and will continue to drive our growth in the years to come.”

Recently, .ORG further protected its 8 million registrants and pioneered a way to upgrade the Internet infrastructure by becoming the first open, unrestricted gTLD to offer full DNSSEC deployment. Starting June 3, 2010, signed registrars can plan to offer an additional security service to the customers, including the ability to thwart the increasing predominance of attacks like pharming, cache poisoning, and DNS redirection that have been used to commit fraud, distribute malware, and/or identity theft.

As of June 2012, there are 10 million million registered .org addresses, which bring in an annual revenue of $65 million. The funds are used for operating costs and technical and organizational maintenance; the remaining funds are donated to ISOC.

On June 2, 2009, The Public Interest Registry announced that the org domain is the first open generic top-level domain and the largest registry overall that has signed its DNS zone with Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). This allows the verification of the origin authenticity and integrity of DNS data by conforming DNS clients.

As of June 23, 2010, DNSSEC was enabled for individual second-level domains, starting with 13 registrars.

.ORG is the third largest generic top-level domain of the Domain Name System used in the internet. .ORG domains have been registered by the Public Interest Registry since 2003. Craigslist.org and Wikipedia.org are among the more popular .ORG users. Since 2009, the Public Interest Registry has published a bi-annual report called “The Dashboard” on the number of registered .ORG domains. There were more than 8 million registered .ORGs in 2009, 8.8 million in 2010, and 9.6 million in 2011. The Public Interest Registry registered the ten millionth .ORG domain in June, 2012. In June 2015 there were 10.5 million .ORG domains registered.

The Public Interest Registry promotes and publicizes the .ORG domain. While .ORG is an open domain, the Public Interest Registry wants more people to view .ORG as a domain for communities and entities that serve the public good, rather than being perceived as directed to non-profits.[26] In 2010, the Public Interest Registry launched “WhyIChose.org” as part of campaign to promote the .ORG domain extension.

It conducted a survey of consumers in 2011 on how domain names are perceived by internet users. The survey found that 81 percent of Americans still rely on an organization’s website before Twitter or Facebook. It also suggested .ORG sites were seen as more trustworthy. Respondents were more likely to turn to .ORG websites in a crisis, more likely to post content on .ORG sites and to trust information on a .ORG domain. It also found that younger age groups were almost twice as likely to register a .ORG as Americans age 55-64.

In July 2015, Public Interest Registry marked the 30th anniversary of the first .ORG registration, and launched a website featuring a timeline of .ORG registrations from 1985 to 2015 and a gallery of .ORG websites. The first .ORG domain name to be registered was mitre.org.

.org Statistics

A Bi-Annual report on the growth of .org showed that as of early 2013 there were 10.1 million .org registrations. The number of domains under management (DUM) grew by 4.3% in 2012, while the registrations in the second-half of the year increased by 11.9%; .ORG DUM have more than doubled during the past seven years, increasing from 3.9 million in 2005 to more than 10.1 million in 2012. Regsitrations experienced marked international growth from 2010 – 2012, Asia and the Australian Pacific grew by 47%, Africa by 23%, and Latin America by 25%.

Registration of .org had consistently grown by 9% to 10% annually for the past three years.

A podcast is an episodic series of digital media files which a user can set up so that new episodes are automatically downloaded via web syndication to the user’s own local computer or portable media player. The word arose as a portmanteau of “iPod” (a brand of media player) and “broadcast”. Thus, the files distributed are typically in audio or video formats, but may sometimes include other file formats such as PDF or ePub.

The distributor of a podcast maintains a central list of the files on a server as a web feed that can be accessed through the Internet. The listener or viewer uses special client application software on a computer or media player, known as a podcatcher, which accesses this web feed, checks it for updates, and downloads any new files in the series. This process can be automated so that new files are downloaded automatically, which may seem to the user as though new episodes are broadcast or “pushed” to them. Files are stored locally on the user’s device, ready for offline use. Podcasting contrasts with webcasting or streaming which do not allow for offline listening, although most podcasts may also be streamed on demand as an alternative to download. Many podcast players (apps as well as dedicated devices) allow listeners to adjust the playback speed.

Some have labeled podcasting as a converged medium bringing together audio, the web, and portable media players, as well as a disruptive technology that has caused some people in the radio business to reconsider established practices and preconceptions about audiences, consumption, production, and distribution. Podcasts are usually free of charge to listeners and can often be created for little to no cost, which sets them apart from the traditional model of “gate-kept” media and production tools. It is very much a horizontal media form: producers are consumers, consumers may become producers, and both can engage in conversations with each other.

“Podcast” is a portmanteau, invented by BBC journalist Ben Hammersley in 2004, of the words “pod” — from iPod, a popular brand of portable media player produced by Apple Inc. — and “broadcast”. Despite the etymology, the content can be accessed using any computer or similar device that can play media files. Use of the term “podcast” predated Apple’s addition of formal support for podcasting to the iPod, or to Apple’s iTunes software.

Other names for podcasting include “net cast”, intended as a vendor-neutral term without the loose reference to the Apple iPod. The name is used by shows from the TWiT.tv network. Some sources have suggested the backronym “portable on demand” for “POD”, for similar reasons.

Many people and groups, including Dawn and Drew of The Dawn and Drew Show, Kris and Betsy Smith of Croncast, and Dan Klass of The Bitterest Pill contributed to the early emergence and popularity of podcasts. Former MTV VJ Adam Curry, in collaboration with Dave Winer, a developer of RSS feeds, is credited with coming up with the idea to automate the delivery and syncing of textual content to portable audio players.

Podcasting, once an obscure method of spreading information, has become a recognized medium for distributing audio content, whether for corporate or personal use. Podcasts are similar to radio programs, but they are audio files. Listeners can play them at their convenience, using devices that have become more common than portable broadcast receivers.

The first application to make this process feasible was iPodderX, developed by August Trometer and Ray Slakinski. By 2007, audio podcasts were doing what was historically accomplished via radio broadcasts, which had been the source of radio talk shows and news programs since the 1930s. This shift occurred as a result of the evolution of internet capabilities along with increased consumer access to cheaper hardware and software for audio recording and editing.

In August 2004, Adam Curry launched his show Daily Source Code. It was a show focused on chronicling his everyday life, delivering news and discussions about the development of podcasting, as well as promoting new and emerging podcasts. Daily Source Code is believed to be the first podcast produced on a consistent basis. Curry published it in an attempt to gain traction in the development of what would come to be known as podcasting and as a means of testing the software outside of a lab setting. The name Daily Source Code was chosen in the hope that it would attract an audience with an interest in technology.

Daily Source Code started at a grassroots level of production and was initially directed at podcast developers. As its audience became interested in the format, these developers were inspired to create and produce their own projects and, as a result, they improved the code used to create podcasts. As more people learned how easy it was to produce podcasts, a community of pioneer podcasters quickly appeared. Despite a lack of a commonly accepted identifying name for the medium at the time of its creation, Daily Source Code is commonly believed to be the first podcast to be published online.

In June 2005, Apple released iTunes 4.9 which added formal support for podcasts, thus negating the need to use a separate program in order to download and transfer them to a mobile device. While this made access to podcasts more convenient and widespread, it also effectively ended advancement of podcatchers by independent developers. Additionally, Apple issued Cease and Desist orders to many podcast application developers and service providers for using the term “iPod” or “Pod” in their products’ names.

Within a year, many podcasts from public radio networks like the BBC, CBC Radio One, National Public Radio, and Public Radio International placed many of their radio shows on the iTunes platform. In addition, major local radio stations like WNYC in New York City and WHYY-FM radio in Philadelphia, KCRW in Los Angeles placed their programs on their websites and later on the iTunes platform.

Concurrently, CNET, This Week in Tech, and later Bloomberg Radio, the Financial Times, and other for-profit companies provided podcast content, some using podcasting as their only distribution system.

Podcast novels

A podcast novel (also known as a serialized audiobook or podcast audiobook) is a literary format that combines the concepts of a podcast and an audiobook. Like a traditional novel, a podcast novel is a work of long literary fiction; however, this form of the novel is recorded into episodes that are delivered online over a period of time and in the end available as a complete work for download. The episodes may be delivered automatically via RSS, through a website, blog, or another syndication method. These files are either listened to directly on a user’s computer or loaded onto a portable media device to be listened to later.

The types of novels that are podcasted vary from new works from new authors that have never been printed, to well-established authors that have been around for years, to classic works of literature that have been in print for over a century. In the same style as an audiobook, podcast novels may be elaborately narrated with separate voice actors for each character and sound effects, similar to a radio play. Other podcast novels have a single narrator reading the text of the story with little or no sound effects.

Podcast novels are distributed over the Internet, commonly on a weblog. Podcast novels are released in episodes on a regular schedule (e.g., once a week) or irregularly as each episode is released when completed. They can either be downloaded manually from a website or blog or be delivered automatically via RSS or another method of syndication. Ultimately, a serialized podcast novel becomes a completed audiobook.

Some podcast novelists give away a free podcast version of their book as a form of promotion. Some such novelists have even secured publishing contracts to have their novels printed. Podcast novelists have commented that podcasting their novels lets them build audiences even if they cannot get a publisher to buy their books. These audiences then make it easier to secure a printing deal with a publisher at a later date. These podcast novelists also claim the exposure that releasing a free podcast gains them makes up for the fact that they are giving away their work for free.

Video podcasts

A video podcast (sometimes shortened to “vodcast”) includes video clips. Web television series are often distributed as video podcasts.

Dead End Days (2003–2004) is commonly believed to be the first video podcast. That serialized dark comedy about zombies was broadcast from 31 October 2003 through 2004.

Since the spread of the Internet and the use of Internet broadband connection TCP, which helps to identify various applications, a faster connection to the Internet has been created and a wide amount of communication has been created. Video podcasts have become extremely popular online and are often presented as short video clips, usually excerpts of a longer recording. Video clips are being used on pre-established websites, and increasing numbers of websites are being created solely for the purpose of hosting video clips and podcasts. Video podcasts are being streamed on intranets and extranets, and private and public networks, and are taking communication through the Internet to whole new levels.

Most video clips are now submitted and produced by individuals.[not specific enough to verify] Video podcasts are also being used for web television, commonly referred to as Web TV, a rapidly growing genre of digital entertainment that uses various forms of new media to deliver to an audience both reruns of shows or series and content created or delivered originally online via broadband and mobile networks, web television shows, or web series. Examples include Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix. Other types of video podcasts used for web television may be short-form, anywhere from 2–9 minutes per episode, typically used for advertising, video blogs, amateur filming, journalism, and convergence with traditional media.

Video podcasting is also helping build businesses, especially in the sales and marketing sectors. Through video podcasts, businesses both large and small can advertise their wares and services in a modern, cost-effective way. In the past, big businesses had better access to expensive studios where sophisticated advertisements were produced, but now even the smallest businesses can create high-quality media with just a camera, editing software, and the Internet.

Oggcast

An oggcast is a podcast recorded and distributed exclusively in the Ogg vorbis audio codec and/or other similarly free codecs. For example, a podcast distributed both in the non-free MP3 format and the free Ogg Vorbis format would not technically meet the definition of an oggcast. In contrast, a podcast distributed in both the Ogg Vorbis and Speex codecs would meet the strict definition of an oggcast. The term oggcast is a combination of the word “ogg” from the term Ogg Vorbis, and the syllable “cast”, from “broadcast”.

The exact timeline of the term oggcast is uncertain. However, The Linux Link Tech Show, one of the longer running Linux podcasts still in production, has a program in the Ogg Vorbis format in its archives from January 7, 2004. Given that a stable release of Ogg Vorbis did not appear until July 19, 2002, it is very likely that the term oggcast was coined sometime between 2002 and 2004.

Oggcasters tend to be broadcasters who prefer not to use audio and video codecs that have patent and/or licensing restrictions, such as the MP3 codec.

Recording and distributing podcasts in the Ogg Vorbis audio format has advantages. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers both support playing Ogg Vorbis files directly in the browser without requiring plugins. Ogg Vorbis may produce better audio quality with a smaller file size than alternative codecs such as AAC or MP3. However, this has not been proven conclusively. Ogg Vorbis is not bound by patents and is considered “free software” in the sense that no corporate entity owns the rights to the format. Some people feel that this is a safer container for their multimedia content for this reason. However, Oggcasters can generally not reach as wide of an audience as more traditional podcasters. This is mainly due to the lack of native Ogg Vorbis support in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari web browser, and the lack of Ogg Vorbis support in many mobile audio devices.

Oggcast planet maintains a central list of oggcasts.

Political podcast

A political podcast focuses on current events, lasts usually a half hour to an hour, often with a relaxed and conversational tone, and features journalists and politicians and pollsters and writers and others with credentials in the public sphere. Most political podcasts have a host-guest interview format and are broadcast each week based on the news cycle. Political podcasts have blossomed in the past few years in the United States because of the long election cycle.

On November 17, 1986, Portal Communications Company registered the portal.com domain name, making it 42nd .com domain ever to be registered.

Portal Software was founded in 1985 as Portal Information Network, one of the first ISPs in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded by John Little. The company offered its own interface through modem access that featured Internet email. Towards the end of the 1980s, the company offered FTP. During this time, the company developed its own account management software. In 1992, John Little decided to focus on developing Portal’s internal software for other ISPs, which he saw as a fast evolving market. Their ISP business was shut down and the accounts sold to Sprint. The company was renamed Portal Software in 1993 and Dave Labuda joined the new company as co-founder. Little and Labuda developed a scalable and flexible real-time enterprise software architecture, which they applied to the management of customers and revenue for internet and telecom service providers.

Company History:

Since it was first established in 1985 as an Internet service provider, Portal Software, Inc. was guided by the vision that the Internet would fundamentally change the way business was done. The company’s founder, John E. Little, was interested in providing companies with a flexible software platform that would handle customer management and billing. With the introduction of Infranet, the software solution that formed the basis of Portal’s product line, in 1996, Portal began to focus exclusively on software. Infranet attracted the attention of telecommunications carriers and other companies that wanted to provide a wider range of Internet-based services. Portal expanded its customer base through partnerships with more than 140 companies, including leading technology innovators and system integrators. As of 2002, Portal had more than 420 customers for its customer management and billing software solutions, more than all of its competitors combined.

Internet Connections and Infrastructure Software: 1985-96

Portal Software, Inc. was founded in 1985 as Portal Communications Co. It was one of the first companies to offer public Internet connections. The company was started in a house in Cupertino, California, by John E. Little, a Princeton graduate in electrical engineering and computer science. After working as a consultant for a few years on the East Coast, he relocated to Silicon Valley from New Jersey. Little wanted to sell infrastructure software that would handle routine transactions for Internet businesses. At the time, there was little demand for such services, so Portal offered public Internet connections.

Over the next several years, Portal began getting more requests for its software. Companies seeking venture capital financing were often referred by the venture capital firms to Portal for basic business functions such as customer management and billing. The company also picked up clients when Little spoke at industry conferences. In late 1993, Portal began focusing more intently on developing and marketing real-time customer management and billing (CM&B) software. In 1994, the company changed its name to Portal Information Network. By the beginning of 1996, software accounted for about half of its business, and Internet service, the other half.

Software Solutions Replacing Internet Service: 1996-99

In May 1996, Portal shipped its first off-the-shelf version of Infranet, its CM&B software package. One of the first customers to choose Infranet was telecommunications provider Sprint Corp. Portal’s Infranet System, as it was called, would allow Sprint customers, including ISPs and carriers, to deliver commercial services over the Internet quickly. Infranet included five core applications that authorized credit card purchases, created databases to track customer statistics, monitored consumer use of the system, collected and processed payments, and managed the system. Businesses using Infranet to manage their customer transactions had the ability to modify their customer interfaces and business processes, implement a set of standard business objects, and connect to various external systems. Analysts noted that gaining Sprint as a customer was a major coup for Portal. They also noted that Infranet’s use of object technology allowed it to be easily adapted to other computer systems and represented an advance over one-off and proprietary solutions. When Portal shut down its ISP service in October 1996, it had been seeking a buyer for its customer base for about a year. That was when the decision to focus on software solutions for ISPs was made. With Portal selling Infranet to larger ISPs, the company did not want to be competing with them. Sprint took over Portal’s ISP customers, which numbered about 5,000. At the time Portal had about 50 employees.

In the first four months of 1997, Portal received orders for Infranet from four major international ISPs: CompuServe and Citizens Telecom in the United States, Australia’s OzEmail, and France’s Grolier Club-Internet. They selected Infranet to provide customer management and delivery capabilities. Portal also signed CAP Gemini Group, Europe’s largest systems integrator, as a distribution and support channel partner. In addition, Microsoft and Portal formed an alliance to run the Infranet platform on the Microsoft Commercial Internet System. Later in the year, the iPass Alliance, the largest Internet access network in the world with more than 100 ISPs, agreed to work with Portal to provide its members with Infranet software to help improve their billing systems.

In October 1997, Portal changed its name to Portal Software, Inc. Starting with fiscal 1997 ending January 31, virtually all of Portal’s revenue came from the licensing of Infranet and related services. For fiscal 1997 Portal reported revenue of $5 million, with $3.9 million from license fees and $1.1 million from services. Services revenue was derived from systems integration and other consulting activities, maintenance agreements, and training of customers and partners. Portal reported a net loss of $2.3 million in fiscal 1997 and had not shown a quarterly or annual profit since 1994, when it began focusing on software. For fiscal 1998, Portal’s revenue nearly doubled to $9.4 million while its net loss increased to $7.6 million. License fees contributed $6.9 million in revenue and services contributed $2.5 million. During fiscal 1998, Portal gained U S West Inc. and Cincinnati Bell Information Systems as customers for Infranet.

In 1998-99, Portal gained more customers, including Juno Online Services, which had more than five million free e-mail accounts. Juno planned to use Infranet to manage tracking, order taking, and customer tracking. Portal also signed a worldwide distribution agreement with American Management Systems Inc., which was a major integrator for telecommunications companies and large corporations. Infranet was recognized for its real-time, flexible billing solutions that allowed online service providers to track use and adjust their pricing. During the year, Portal formed several alliances with other manufacturers, a strategy for growth that the company would pursue over the next several years. Through an alliance with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) SkyWave Inc., Portal was able to make a version of Infranet available to providers of Internet telephony services. Another alliance with Verifone Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard Co., resulted in the integration of Verifone’s vPOS payment software into the Infranet system. The result was that Portal customers could have direct connections to financial institutions for online payment processing.

For fiscal 1999, Portal reported revenue of $26.7 million, a 283 percent increase over 1998. Revenue was evenly split between license fees ($13.5 million) and services ($13.1 million). Costs and expenses also increased, with research and development spending doubling to $11.3 million in 1999 from $5.6 million in 1998. Sales and marketing expenses also increased substantially, from $5.4 million in 1998 to $14.1 million in fiscal 1999. As a result, the company’s net loss grew to $17.1 million.

Going Public: 1999-2001

By February 1999, when Portal filed its initial registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its initial public offering (IPO), there were approximately 80 companies using Infranet. They included ISPs, such as Concentric Network Corp. and UUNet Technologies; online enterprises, including Juno Online Services and Palm.net; and online divisions of telecommunications carriers, such as BellSouth Corp. and U S West Inc. These customers represented Portal’s target market of providers of advanced communications services worldwide. Portal also had established a series of partnerships with systems integrators, such as Andersen Consulting LLP, Cap Gemini Group, NTT Software Corp., and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and with hardware and software manufacturers, including Cisco Systems, Compaq Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. When Portal went public in May 1999, Cisco Systems bought three million shares of Portal for $39 million, which represented 4 percent of the company’s shares. In April, the company opened a new European headquarters in Slough, United Kingdom. Later in the year, Portal moved its U.S. headquarters into a new four-story building on De Anza Boulevard in Cupertino that it purchased from Symantec Corporation. Toward the end of 1999, Portal opened a wholly owned subsidiary in Tokyo, Japan. Partners in the subsidiary included three distributors: Bussan Systems Integrations Co. Ltd., Itochu Techno-Science Corp., and NTT Software Corp.

Portal’s customer base for Infranet grew to more than 200 companies by the end of fiscal 2000. The company’s target market had grown to include not only the online service divisions of traditional telecommunications providers and online and Internet service providers, but also wireless service divisions, application service providers (ASPs), and companies that used the Internet to provide entirely new types of communications services. Portal’s Infranet technology gave these customers scalability and reliability, enterprise integration and interoperability, comprehensive functionality and ease of use, and flexibility and improved time to market. Infranet allowed customers to manage the customer life cycle, including account creation and service provisioning, authentication and authorization, activity tracking, rating and pricing, billing and accounts receivable, customer management, and reporting. Business benefits to the customer included increased revenue, reduced costs, and improved customer service.

Portal offered customers several capabilities and features as optional additions to the basic Infranet solution. These included Infranet IPT, introduced in September 1998, for providers of Internet telephony services. Infranet DNA, introduced in fiscal 2000, was an option for customers requiring high availability and fault tolerance; it used remote, limited scope satellite installations of Infranet to handle user authentication, service authorization, and event queuing. During normal operation, the satellite installations of Infranet were updated in real time from the customer’s main database. If the main database went offline, the satellite installation provided continuous operation of the customer’s service and avoided denial of access. Infranet MultiDB was another option introduced in fiscal 2000. It was aimed at customers with very high subscriber counts and enabled the distribution of accounts across multiple databases in a single Infranet installation. For fiscal 2000, Portal reported revenue of $103 million, nearly four times the previous year’s revenue. Portal’s dramatic growth in revenue reflected the changing nature of Internet service providers and the introduction of new Internet-based services that required flexible CM&B software that could scale from hundreds to millions of users and that was adaptable to a wide range of services. Portal continued to spend a sizeable portion of its revenue on research and development, while managing to reduce its net loss from $17.4 million in 1999 to $7.6 million in 2000.

After one year as a public company, Portal had grown to more than 750 employees. Approximately one-third of its workforce was in sales and marketing, and nearly one-third was in engineering. Portal maintained a direct sales force in 13 states and internationally in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Portal also pursued its sales efforts through its strategic partners. During fiscal 2001, Portal’s customer base more than doubled to some 420 companies. The company gained several large international customers, including iAdvantage, which owned and operated five Internet service centers in Hong Kong, China, and Singapore. Japan’s NTTPC Communications, a subsidiary of Japan’s largest telecommunications group NTT, selected Infranet to support several new business initiatives. Telekom Malaysia, the country’s leading telecommunications carrier, deployed Infranet to support the further expansion of its ISP, TMnet. Other new business in Asia came from Shanghai Telecom and China’s Liaoning Telecom. Israel’s national telecommunications provider, Bezeq, chose Infranet to provide customer management and billing for its high-speed DSL service.

Portal reported record revenue of $268.3 million for fiscal 2001. The company also reduced its net loss to $2.3 million, even as spending on research and development more than doubled to $57.7 million and sales and marketing expenses more than doubled to $128.7 million. During fiscal 2001, Portal made one of its few acquisitions, purchasing Solutions42, a developer of third generation (3G) technology, for about $200 million.

Declining Revenues: 2001-2002

Portal began fiscal 2002 by announcing a new multi-year contract with America Online, under which America Online licensed Infranet to support a wide range of services. Later in the year, Time Warner Cable licensed Infranet to allow its subscribers to independently select services from various ISPs. Cidera, a provider of broadband content via satellite, chose Infranet to offer its customers real-time, activity-based billing in an open, scalable environment. Internationally, several wireless providers joined Portal’s customer base, including Vodafone UK and Australia’s Telstra OnAir. Finland’s Nokia Networks announced it would build Portal’s Infranet software into its mobile networks and also resell the software to its infrastructure customers. Taiwan’s eASPNet, a consortium formed by leading Taiwanese and Asian companies, selected Infranet to support the rapid rollout of new services, include Internet data centers and ASPs.

During the year, Portal formed a global strategic alliance with IBM. The focus of the alliance was to provide wireless service providers with a comprehensive 3G-ready infrastructure platform by integrating IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Suite with Portal’s Infranet. Another alliance formed in 2001 involved Reliacast Inc., a developer of audience management software and the intelligent delivery of content. Reliacast planned to integrate its audience management solution with Portal’s Infranet to create a comprehensive audience management and billing solution for the delivery of live and cached web-based events.

In mid-2001, Canadian wireless operator TELUS Mobility implemented Infranet to manage real-time revenue sharing with its more than 80 content providers. Later in the year TELUS used Infranet to offer its customers pay-per-use billing and extended its contract with Portal. TELUS became the first announced customer for Portal’s Infranet Content Connector, a new billing interface that linked communications providers, content providers, and value-added service providers. For fiscal 2002, Portal reported a 42 percent decline in revenue to $154.8 million. On a pro forma basis, the company’s net loss was $85.9 million. Pro forma results excluded a restructuring charge of $71 million, the write-off of purchased technology and goodwill of $199.2 million, the amortization of acquisition-related costs of $35.4 million, and another $4 million write-off for impairment of equity investments. Taking those charges into account, Portal had a net loss of $395.5 million for fiscal 2002.

Looking ahead to 2002-03, Portal expected its business to be affected by the slowdown in capital expenditures by telecommunications companies and content providers. In February 2002, the company strengthened its management team by hiring Glenn R. Wienkoop as president and chief operating officer. Wienkoop had more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry, having served in executive positions with Measurex Corp., SDRC (Structural Dynamics Research Corp.), and Cognex Corp.

By the mid-1990s there was discussion of introduction of more TLDs. Jon Postel, as head of IANA, invited applications from interested parties. In early 1995, Postel created “Draft Postel”, an Internet draft containing the procedures to create new domain name registries and newTLDs. Draft Postel created a number of small committees to approve the newTLDs. Because of the increasing interest, a number of large organizations took over the process under the Internet Society’s umbrella. This second attempt involved setting up a temporary organizationcalled the International Ad HocCommittee (IAHC). On February 4, 1997, the IAHC issued a report ignoring the Draft Postel recommendations and instead recommended the introduction of sevennew TLDs (arts, firm, info, nom,rec, store, and web). However, these proposals were abandoned after the U.S. government intervened.

1995 Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, Voice over InternetProtocol (VoIP) “phone calls”, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF’s very high speed BackboneNetwork Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow,driven by ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking.

On March 4, 1987, Prime Computer registered the prime.com domain name, making it 65th .com domain ever to be registered.

Prime Computer, Inc. was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. The alternative spellings “PR1ME” and “PR1ME Computer” were used as brand names or logos by the company.

History

The original products were clones of the Honeywell 316 and 516 minicomputers.

1972: Prime 200

The first Prime system, similar to the DDP 516 but a 32-bit machine with paging. It ran an operating system called DOS, also referred to as PRIMOS 2 (not to be confused with MS-DOS, PC DOS, etc.).

1973: Prime 100

The Prime 100 was a stripped down version of the Prime 200 (no memory parity or floating point).

1974: Prime 300

The Prime 300 had a main store of 32KB to 512 KB and from 6MB of Pertec disc storage. It ran DOSVM operating system, also referred to as PRIMOS 3, but still used earlier DOS for booting. One of the first minicomputers with microcode-supported virtual memory capability. The virtual memory was simpler than used in later systems. Addresses were 16 bits, with each of up to 32 time-sharing (time slice) users, receiving a virtual 64K word address space. It had S-mode and R-mode instructions.

An example of the Prime 300 was installed in the mathematics department of the University of Aston in Birmingham, UK and at the Medical University of Hannover, Germany.

1976: Prime 400

The Prime 400 ran at 0.5 MIPS, had a main store of up to 8MB and 160MB of disc storage. The name PRIMOS was now used for the operating system and the P400 ran PRIMOS 4. It ran a V-mode instruction set, along with the S-mode and R-mode instructions. It had a segmented virtual memory architecture, somewhat similar to Multics.

1979: Prime 450, 550, 650, 750

The Prime 550 was an upgrade in performance over the Prime 400. It ran at 0.7 MIPS, had up 2MB of memory and 500MB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit.

The Prime 750 was a major upgrade. It ran at 1.0 MIPS, had 2-8MB of memory and 1200MB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit. This was very competitive with a similarly priced DEC VAX-11/780 and was one of the first 32-bit superminicomputers. Prime 750 systems were installed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), University of Paisley, Leeds University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), University of Rhode Island, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), and the CADCentre in Cambridge.

PRIMENET and the local area network software RINGNET were announced.

1980: Prime 150 and 250

1981: Prime 850 (dual CPU machine)

Prime also marketed MEDUSA CAD Software

1982: Prime 2250 also known internally as “Rabbit”

1984: Prime 2550, 9650, 9750

1985: Prime 9955, 9655, 2655

The 9955 ran at 4.0 MIPS, had 8-16MB of memory and 2.7GB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit. Five Prime 9955 computers (uk.ac.salford.sysa to .syse, connected to JANET) were installed at the University of Salford (along with other systems such as the 2250, 2550, and 750); a Prime 9955 was installed at UMIST and a Prime 9655 at Nottingham University.

1986: Prime 2350, 2450, 9755, and 9955-II

1987: Prime 2455, 2755, 6350, and 6550

By 1987 Prime Computer had introduced an alternative line of Intel 80386-based computers, the EXL-316 series, running the Unix operating system.

The company was successful in the 1970s and 1980s, peaking in 1988 at number 334 of the Fortune 500. In 1985 the company was the 6th largest in the minicomputer sector, with estimated revenues of US $564 million.  Much of this was based on the US Banking industry where the Pr1me Info database was widely accepted.

As of later 1989, Surrey University had the largest Prime Site in Europe, having multiple copies of virtually every 50 series machine (mostly running Primos 20.x, but some still running 19.x).

Prime was heavily involved with Ford’s internal computer-aided design (CAD) product, Product Design Graphics System (PDGS). Design engineers used PDGS for auto body design, and finite element analysis using NASTRAN. It used a vectorscope from Lundy for a display. At one time in 1980s it was the world largest integrated CAD system, spanning the US, Japan (Mazda was Ford’s subsidiary/partner), (Cologne) Germany, (Dunton) England and (Geelong) Australia. The creators of PDGS, located in building #3 of Ford’s Dearborn design headquarters, began working on the concept of parametrically driven geometry, which led to a PRIMEDesign system.

The company also had marketing rights to the MEDUSA CAD system, produced in England by Cambridge Interactive Systems (CIS), and having experience in the domain, the company explored transitioning to a CAD company. It embarked on a project headed by Vladimir Geisberg to build a CAD-CAM system of its own called PRIMEDesign. This product was to compete with the industry leader at that time, CADDS4 from Computervision. RISC processors from MIPS Technologies and graphics processors from Silicon Graphics created the platform for PRIMEDesign as well as being the genesis of modern-day SGI. During this period, in 1985, Sam Geisberg left Computervision to found Parametric Technology Corporation and produce a supposedly parameter driven CAD system called ProEngineer. Computervision acquired Cambridge Interactive Systems in 1983, and Prime independently developed their own version of MEDUSA.

Prime subsequently purchased Computervision and Vladimir Geisberg, then VP for CAD, tried to merge back together the Prime and Computervision versions of the Medusa CAD system, and to launch Prime Design. As time passed it became clear that Prime Design, while leading edge in theory, was totally unsuitable for real engineering design work. Prime Design was canned and Vladimir Geisberg was sacked in 1990 having failed to launch a viable CAD product and having destroyed the development organization for the ongoing Medusa CAD product.

By the late eighties, the company was having problems retaining customers who were moving to lower-cost systems. In addition, Prime was failing to keep up with the increasing customers’ need for raw computing power. By the end, not a single Prime computer was subject to COCOM export controls, as they were insufficiently powerful for the US Government to fear their falling into the hands of hostile powers. The computer design and manufacturing portions of the company were shut down and the company was renamed Computervision. In 1992, Computervision sold Prime Information to Vmark Corporation. In 1998, it was bought by Parametric Technology Corporation. The remainder of the company became a support organisation for existing customers.

CAD/CAM

Prime originally entered the CAD industry through Ford. At the time, Ford was using Control Data Corporation (CDC) stand-alone computers. Data was shared via reel tape and stored in “Data Collector” rooms at each facility. Ford began looking for a small computer that had all the advantages of the CDC computers, but could also connect to a network. Prime’s 2250 (“Rabbit”) offered the combination Ford was looking for in a package smaller than the original CDCs. In addition, the PRIMOS operating system would run unaltered across all Prime platforms; from the 2250 up to 750 (what would be considered today as a server). As a result, the Data Collector (rooms) would contain several 750 class machines, each with rows of CDC 300 or 600MB drives. Primenet (token ring) network connected all CAD stations in a building with its Data Collector.

Ford pushed PDGS out to its suppliers and engineering contractors throughout the northern Midwest. Prime gained expertise over the years with its collaboration with Ford and continued to expand into the CAD market with its Medusa product. With the acquisition of ComputerVision, Prime appeared to be a formidable force in the CAD/CAM industry. Prime Medusa versions 5 and CV Medusa 7 were merged/recombined into a product that was called Medusa version 12. Prime also picked up Calma CAD systems from GE.

The domain name pro is a generic top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from professional, indicating its intended use by certified professionals.

In October 2000 Jason Drummond came up with the concept for a new top level domain name (TLD) and established RegistryPro to jointly bid with Register.com for .pro. In May 2002 RegistryPro signed its contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) the organisation that administers global domain names; under which it will operate the registry for the new top level domain (TLD) .pro.

The domain was originally launched in June 2004 with registrations restricted to lawyers, accountants, physicians and engineers in France, Canada, Germany, UK and the US.

In March 2005, the registrar EnCirca introduced its controversial ProForwarding service which enabled unverified individuals and businesses to register pro domains. Registrants then had thirty days to provide verified credentials prior to their domain being activated. Total registrations reached 6,899 by January 2008.

Following consultation with ICANN, the domain was relaunched in September 2008 with a wider remit to include government certified professionals in all countries. Registrants are required to self-certify their professional status and agree to terms of use before registration, then subsequently provide detailed license information.

In 2012, RegistryPro was acquired by Afilias Limited.

Registrations

The official domain website describes the eligibility criteria as follows:

Applicant provides professional services

Applicant is admitted to or licensed by a government certification body or jurisdictional licensing entity recognized by a governmental body that regularly verifies the accuracy of its data.

Applicant is in good standing.

The domain registry allows registration of third-level domains in the following domains:

Legal: law.pro, avocat.pro, bar.pro, jur.pro, recht.pro

Accountancy: cpa.pro, aaa.pro, aca.pro, acct.pro

Medical: med.pro

Engineering: eng.pro

As of April 2011, the domains may be registered through 44 accredited domain registrars. In January 2011, the number of registered domains surpassed 100,000. As reported in April 2010, the majority of domains are registered in the United States (42%), followed by France (24%) and Russian Federation (5%).

A regulatory change made the .pro domain name unrestricted to all registrants starting November 16, 2015.

The PROTECT Act incorporates the Truth in Domain Names Act (TDNA) of 2003 (originally two separate Bills, submitted by Senator Orrin Hatch and Congressman Mike Pence), codified at 18 U.S.C. § 2252(B)(b).

The Truth in Domain Names Act was introduced to prevent the use of a misleading domain name with the intent to deceive a person into viewing obscenity on the Internet. The Act makes it an offense punishable with fine or imprisonment not more than 2 years, or both. In case it is used to mislead a minor into viewing material that is harmful to minors on the Internet, the punishment comes to imprisonment not more than 4 years, fine or both. Material that is harmful to minors’ include any communication that when taken as a whole and with respect to minors, appeals to a prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion; depicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals; and any material that when taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value as to minors.

The provisions of Truth in Domain Names Act was later incorporated in the PROTECT Act of 2003.

Truth in Domain Names Act of 2003

As a part of the massive 2003 PROTECT Act (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act), which included the AMBER Alert legislation, Congress passed the Truth in Domain Names Act. The Truth in Domain Names Act is an attempt to thwart the use of deceitful domain names for the purpose of attracting surfers to pornographic websites. A demonstration of the usefulness of the law is quite simple. Go to whitehouse.gov and you will find out information concerning the President of the United States; go to whitehouse.com and, well, you will find out something else; it may deal with White House interns but it is probably not what you are looking for if you meant to find out information concerning the latest executive order.

The legislation is straight forward. Those who use domain names in order to trick people into viewing obscenity will land up in the slammer; trick kids into viewing material harmful to minors and you end up in the slammer for longer.

The Department of Justice broke this new law in with a bang in 2003, arresting John Zuccarini. Zuccarini reportedly was a notorious typo squatter, taking advantage of individuals who type domain names incorrectly. Zuccarini apparently was the owner of Teltubbies.com and Bobthebiulder.com which directed individuals to a porn site known as Hanky Panky College. For these actions, Zuccarini, the first individual arrested under the Act, was sentenced to two and a half years contemplation of his deeds behind bars.

As an Internet entrepreneur, in 1989 he was one of the first domain investors and acquired over 12,000 one worded domains in the Internet’s early history.

January 12th, 1992

Phil Fischer drops all 12303 of the one worded domain names for lack of payment. A few years later Greatdomains.com brokers the same domain names such as loans.com, and car.com, and business.com for Millions. Estimated value of Fischer’s portfolio was over Twenty three Million.

Phil Fischer, CEO of Northwest Online, operating from a 286 computer in Portland, Oregon loads up into the internet a website offering design services. The link “webdesign” off of archie becomes the 202nd website on the internet and the first website in the world offering design services.

Later changed to SSD, Fischer charged his clients $250.00 per “web page” designing more than 5000 websites.  Later built the  AOL chat room system and Ebay.

On April 4, 1987, Philips registered the philips.com domain name, making it 67th .com domain ever to be registered.

Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Royal Philips, commonly known as Philips) is a Dutch technology company headquartered in Amsterdam with primary divisions focused in the areas of electronics, healthcare and lighting. It was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik. It is one of the largest electronics companies in the world and employs around 105,000 people across more than 60 countries. Philips is organized into three main divisions: Philips Consumer Lifestyle (formerly Philips Consumer Electronics and Philips Domestic Appliances and Personal Care), Philips Healthcare (formerly Philips Medical Systems) and Philips Lighting.  As of 2012 Philips was the largest manufacturer of lighting in the world measured by applicable revenues. In 2013, the company announced the sale of the bulk of its remaining consumer electronics operations to Japan’s Funai Electric Co, but in October 2013, the deal to Funai Electric Co was broken off and the consumer electronics operations remain under Philips. Philips said it would seek damages for breach of contract in the $200-million sale. In April 2016, the International Court of Arbitration ruled in favour of Philips, awarding compensation of 135 million Euro in the process. Philips has a primary listing on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange and is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

History

The Philips Company was founded in 1891 by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik. Frederik, a banker based in Zaltbommel, financed the purchase and setup of a modest, empty factory building in Eindhoven, where the company started the production of carbon-filament lamps and other electro-technical products in 1892. This first factory has been adapted and is used as a museum. In 1895, after a difficult first few years and near bankruptcy, the Philipses brought in Anton, Gerard’s younger brother by sixteen years. Though he had earned a degree in engineering, Anton started work as a sales representative; soon, however, he began to contribute many important business ideas. With Anton’s arrival, the family business began to expand rapidly, resulting in the founding of Philips Metaalgloeilampfabriek N.V. (Philips Metal Filament Lamp Factory Ltd.) in Eindhoven in 1908, followed in 1912 by the foundation of Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken N.V. (Philips Lightbulb Factories Ltd.). After Gerard and Anton Philips changed their family business by founding the Philips corporation, they laid the foundations for the later electronics multinational.

In the 1920s, the company started to manufacture other products, such as vacuum tubes. In 1939 they introduced their electric razor, the Philishave (marketed in the US using the Norelco brand name). The “Chapel” is a radio with built-in loudspeaker, which was designed during the early 1930s.

Philips Radio

On 11 March 1927 Philips went on the air with shortwave radio station PCJJ (later PCJ) which was joined in 1929 by sister station PHOHI (Philips Omroep Holland-Indië). PHOHI broadcast in Dutch to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) while PCJJ broadcast in English, Spanish and German to the rest of the world. The international program on Sundays commenced in 1928, with host Eddie Startz hosting the Happy Station show, which became the world’s longest-running shortwave program. Broadcasts from the Netherlands were interrupted by the German invasion in May 1940. The Germans commandeered the transmitters in Huizen to use for pro-Nazi broadcasts, some originating from Germany, others concerts from Dutch broadcasters under German control. Philips Radio was absorbed shortly after liberation when its two shortwave stations were nationalised in 1947 and renamed Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the Dutch International Service. Some PCJ programs, such as Happy Station, continued on the new station.

Stirling engine

Philips was instrumental in the revival of the Stirling engine when, in the early 1930s, the management decided that offering a low-power portable generator would assist in expanding sales of its radios into parts of the world where mains electricity was unavailable and the supply of batteries uncertain. Engineers at the company’s research lab carried out a systematic comparison of various power sources and determined that the almost forgotten Stirling engine would be most suitable, citing its quiet operation (both audibly and in terms of radio interference) and ability to run on a variety of heat sources (common lamp oil – “cheap and available everywhere” – was favoured). They were also aware that, unlike steam and internal combustion engines, virtually no serious development work had been carried out on the Stirling engine for many years and asserted that modern materials and know-how should enable great improvements.

Encouraged by their first experimental engine, which produced 16 W of shaft power from a bore and stroke of 30 mm × 25 mm,[10] various development models were produced in a programme which continued throughout World War II. By the late 1940s the ‘Type 10′ was ready to be handed over to Philips’ subsidiary Johan de Witt in Dordrecht to be productionised and incorporated into a generator set as originally planned. The result, rated at 180/200 W electrical output from a bore and stroke of 55 mm x 27 mm, was designated MP1002CA (known as the “Bungalow set”). Production of an initial batch of 250 began in 1951, but it became clear that they could not be made at a competitive price, besides which the advent of transistor radios with their much lower power requirements meant that the original rationale for the set was disappearing. Approximately 150 of these sets were eventually produced. In parallel with the generator set Philips developed experimental Stirling engines for a wide variety of applications and continued to work in the field until the late 1970s, though the only commercial success was the ‘reversed Stirling engine’ cryocooler. However, they filed a large number of patents and amassed a wealth of information, which they later licensed to other companies.

Shavers

The first Philips shaver was introduced in the 1930s, and was simply called “The Philishave”. In the USA, it was called the “Norelco”, which remains a part of their product line today.

1945 to 2001

After the war the company was moved back to the Netherlands, with their headquarters in Eindhoven. In 1949, the company began selling television sets. In 1950, it formed Philips Records. Philips introduced the audio Compact Audio Cassette tape in 1963, and it was wildly successful. Compact cassettes were initially used for dictation machines for office typing stenographers and professional journalists. As their sound quality improved, cassettes would also be used to record sound and became the second mass media alongside vinyl records used to sell recorded music. Philips introduced the first combination portable radio and cassette recorder, which was marketed as the “radiorecorder”, and is now better known as the boom box. Later, the cassette was used in telephone answering machines, including a special form of cassette where the tape was wound on an endless loop. The C-cassette was used as the first mass storage device for early personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s. Philips reduced the cassette size for the professional needs with the Mini-Cassette, although it would not be as successful as the Olympus Microcassette. This became the predominant dictation medium up to the advent of fully digital dictation machines.

In 1972 Philips launched the world’s first home video cassette recorder, in the UK, the N1500. Its relatively bulky video cassettes could record 30 minutes or 45 minutes. Later one-hour tapes were also offered. As competition came from Sony’s Betamax and the VHS group of manufacturers, Philips introduced the N1700 system which allowed double-length recording. For the first time, a 2-hour movie could fit onto one video cassette. In 1977, the company unveiled a special promotional film for this system in the UK, featuring comedian Denis Norden. The concept was quickly copied by the Japanese makers, whose tapes were significantly cheaper. Philips made one last attempt at a new standard for video recorders with the Video 2000 system, with tapes that could be used on both sides and had 8 hours of total recording time. As Philips only sold its systems on the PAL standard and in Europe, and the Japanese makers sold globally, the scale advantages of the Japanese proved insurmountable and Philips withdrew the V2000 system and joined the VHS Coalition.

Philips had developed a LaserDisc early on for selling movies, but delayed its commercial launch for fear of cannibalizing its video recorder sales. Later Philips joined with MCA to launch the first commercial LaserDisc standard and players. In 1982, Philips teamed with Sony to launch the Compact Disc; this format evolved into the CD-R, CD-RW, DVD and later Blu-ray, which Philips launched with Sony in 1997 and 2006 respectively.

In 1984, Philips split off its activities on the field of photolithographic integrated circuit production equipment, the so-called wafer steppers, into a joint venture with ASM International, located in Veldhoven under the name ASML. Over the years, this new company has evolved into the world’s leading manufacturer of chip production machines at the expense of competitors like Nikon and Canon.

In 1991, the company’s name was changed from N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken to Philips Electronics N.V. At the same time, North American Philips was formally dissolved, and a new corporate division was formed in the U.S. with the name Philips Electronics North America Corp.

In 1997 the company officers decided to move the headquarters from Eindhoven to Amsterdam along with the corporate name change to Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.[citation needed] The move was completed in 2001. Initially, the company was housed in the Rembrandt Tower, but in 2002 they moved again, this time to the Breitner Tower. Philips Lighting, Philips Research, Philips Semiconductors (spun off as NXP in September 2006) and Philips Design, are still based in Eindhoven. Philips Healthcare is headquartered in both Best, Netherlands (near Eindhoven) and Andover, Massachusetts, United States (near Boston).

In 2000, Philips bought Optiva Corporation, the maker of Sonicare electric toothbrushes. The company was renamed Philips Oral Healthcare and made a subsidiary of Philips DAP.

In 2001, Philips acquired the Healthcare Solutions Group (HSG) based in Böblingen, Germany from Agilent Technologies for EUR 2 billion.

2001 to 2011

In 2004, Philips abandoned the slogan “Let’s make things better” in favour of a new one: “Sense and simplicity”.

In December 2005 Philips announced its intention to sell or demerge its semiconductor division. On 1 September 2006, it was announced in Berlin that the name of the new company formed by the division would be NXP Semiconductors. On 2 August 2006, Philips completed an agreement to sell a controlling 80.1% stake in NXP Semiconductors to a consortium of private equity investors consisting of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), Silver Lake Partners and AlpInvest Partners. On 21 August 2006, Bain Capital and Apax Partners announced that they had signed definitive commitments to join the acquiring consortium, a process which was completed on 1 October 2006. In 2006 Philips bought out the company Lifeline Systems headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts. In August 2007 Philips acquired the company Ximis, Inc. headquartered in El Paso, Texas for their Medical Informatics Division. In October 2007, it purchased a Moore Microprocessor Patent (MPP) Portfolio license from The TPL Group.

On 21 December 2007 Philips and Respironics, Inc. announced a definitive agreement pursuant to which Philips acquired all of the outstanding shares of Respironics for US$66 per share, or a total purchase price of approximately €3.6 billion (US$5.1 billion) in cash.

On 21 February 2008 Philips completed the acquisition of VISICU Baltimore, Maryland through the merger of its indirect wholly owned subsidiary into VISICU. As a result of that merger, VISICU has become an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Philips. VISICU was the creator of the eICU concept of the use of Telemedicine from a centralized facility to monitor and care for ICU patients. The Philips physics laboratory was scaled down in the early 21st century, as the company ceased trying to be innovative in consumer electronics through fundamental research.

2011 to present

In January 2011 Philips agreed to acquire the assets of Preethi, a leading India-based kitchen appliances company.

On 27 June 2011 Philips acquired Sectra Mamea AB, the mammography division of Sectra AB, together with the MicroDose brand.

Because net profit slumped 85 percent in Q3 2011, Philips announced a cut of 4,500 jobs to match part of an €800 million ($1.1 billion) cost-cutting scheme to boost profits and meet its financial target.

In March 2012 Philips announced its intention to sell, or demerge its television manufacturing operations to TPV Technology.

In 2011, the company posted a loss of €1.3 billion, but earned a net profit in Q1 and Q2 2012, however the management wanted €1.1 billion cost-cutting which was an increase from €800 million and may cut another 2,200 jobs until end of 2014.

On 5 December 2012, the antitrust regulators of the European Union fined Philips and several other major companies for fixing prices of TV cathode-ray tubes in two cartels lasting nearly a decade.

On 29 January 2013, it was announced that Philips had agreed to sell its audio and video operations to the Japan-based Funai Electric for €150 million, with the audio business planned to transfer to Funai in the latter half of 2013, and the video business in 2017.[33][34] As part of the transaction, Funai was to pay a regular licensing fee to Philips for the use of the Philips brand. The purchase agreement was terminated by Philips in October because of breach of contract.

In April 2013, Philips announced a collaboration with Paradox Engineering for the realization and implementation of a “pilot project” on network-connected street-lighting management solutions. This project was endorsed by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC).

In 2013, Philips omitted the word “Electronics” from its name, which is now Royal Philips N.V.

On 13 November 2013 Philips unveiled its new brand line “Innovation and You” and a new design of its shield mark. The new brand positioning is cited by Philips to signify company’s evolution and emphasize that innovation is only meaningful if it is based on an understanding of people’s needs and desires.

On 28 April 2014 Philips agreed to sell their Woox Innovations subsidiary (consumer electronics) to Gibson Brands for $US135 million.

On 23 September 2014, Philips announced a plan to split the company into two, separating the lighting business from the healthcare and consumer lifestyle divisions. it moved to complete this in March 2015 to an investment group for $3.3 billion

On February 2015, Philips acquired Volcano Corporation to strengthen its position in non-invasive surgery and imaging.

On June 2016, Philips spun off its lighting division to focus on the healthcare division.

Total .org domains registered hits 9.2 million at end of June.

Public Interest Registry, which operates .org, today confirmed continued strong registration growth of .org domain names.

Total domains under management eclipsed 9 million on March 2 and ended at 9.2 million at the end of the first half of the year.

The company’s .Org “Dashboard Report” shows a 10.1% increase in domains under management for the first half of the year. That compares to 9.7% growth in 2010.

The report also shows a graph for domains under management that shows lower increases and is probably comparing the beginning and ending of the half. It shows 4% growth for .org, which is less than that of .net, .com, .info, and .mobi, but higher than .biz (which showed a loss).