Good Job, Brain! - 121: Dot Com

Episode Date: August 6, 2014

Let's face it, we all heart the internet, so this week, we are jamming pub-quiz-worthy webby facts into the tubes to your brain. Learn about the history behind the @ symbol and how it became synonymous with email, and find out where salad.com and coffee.com take you, along with other generic URLs that cleverly redirects you to some of the top brands and companies. Take the country domain quiz, and just how email savvy are you? ALSO: 1960's Jeopardy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, dear, dapper, darling, dames, and darts. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 121, and of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your Voltron of vocal, voracious volunteers. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And I'm Chris. I call Black Lion. I call Black, green, red, yellow, blue. Yeah. Oh, like Olympic rings. Yeah. Yellow and blue are the legs, green and red are the arms.

Wow. Oh. So I'm like a fan. That was possibly, as big a Star Wars fan as I am, that was possibly my favorite single toy was the Voltron Lion bot set. Yeah, just awesome, awesome piece of toy technology. It's time for our first segment, which is called 1960s Jeopardy. Yeah. A lot of time listeners may remember that at one point at a flea market here in Berkeley, California, USA, we discovered a brand new copy of the home version of Jeopardy from the 1960. Frozen in Time. Exactly.

And so I'm going to be giving you the. answers and you will give me the questions but these are things that people, they thought that the home audience would know in the decade known as the 1960s. Wow. Oh, this is the first

Pop-Quiz hot shot I get to play in a while. Wow. Well, here we go. All right. We're going to start you off. We're going to do two categories here. We're going to start you guys off with toys. Oh. Okay. For 100. Oh, excuse me. It's a 60s Jeopardy. For $20.

Yes. There is always one less seat than players. Oh. Dana? What is musical chairs? Yes, what is musical chairs. Is that a toy? More of a game.

Yeah. For $40. Boxers to improve footwork or little girls for fun. Dana, again. What is jump rope? Yes, what is. Who plays jump rope? Oh.

For $60. number of checkers each player is provided with Dana again What is 12? It is 12 Wow you're doing It's like I work on games or something I'm just kidding

In the game of hearts She counts 13 points against you Oh geez I heard Dana again The Queen of Spades The Queen of Spades Yes I think Karen was her I think Karen had that one. What does your buzzer sound like?

You never... No, I keep... We all... I see, I keep hearing the ding-dong. I keep hearing ding-dong. That's the power of the ding-dongs. I know. I hear more than everything else.

Okay. And finally, for $100, all of Monopoly's streets really exist in this city. Colin. What is Atlantic City, New Jersey? Atlantic City, New Jersey. Yes. All right.

move into double jeopardy and I'll, uh... Oh, is it actual double jeopardy? Well, technically that was double jeopardy. Oh, really? But now we'll go into double jeopardy and I'll really double the money. This seemed really easy for double jeopardy. You know, some of these categories are, I really want to stress. Just completely impossible.

Like, showbiz, Billy Rose created this show for Eleanor Holm. Wow. No one at all? Man, no mistake. What's the answer? What is the answer? The answer is, uh, what is the, uh, yes, what is the aqua? What is the aquacade? I have never heard of Aquacade, Billy Rose, or Eleanor Hall.

I'm having a panic attack. Like, there's all these words. I don't know. I have never heard before. You lost me at Billy Rose. What? What? I'm going to crank up the difficulty a little bit. Here we go. The category is quotes. Shoot. $40. Why Lincoln thought God must love the common man. Why Lincoln thought, God must love the common man. I believe the quote starts, God must love the common man, dot, dot, dot. This is about... This is 1860s, Jeffrey. Yeah.

Oh, so this is a quote from Abraham Lincoln. Yes. God must love the common man. I'm going to go ahead and tell you. Yes, please do. It is, the end of that quote is, because he made so many of them. Ah. Yes.

Okay, how about this way? That's from Lincoln. So, one man, one man show. Yeah. Just aid. We're still in quotes. In Exodus, it precedes hand for hand, foot for foot. Oh, okay.

This was Dana. Is this eye for eye? Wait, I don't understand. Colin. What is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Yes. What is eye for eye, tooth for tooth? Okay.

So technically, eye for eye did come before those things. Before that, well, I guess a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Signing, he said, not sign languaging. Signing, he said, there, I guess King George will be able to read that. Dana.

Who is John Hancock? Who is John Hancock, indeed. After he'd signed the Declaration of Education. John, you took up the whole page. That's a sad. At least you a good handwriting. Like, how bad would we look as a nation if, like, the biggest one. It was just like this ugly chicken scratch.

It looks like a third grader in it. I think he's a left. I think you're really left-handed, John. Like, you should switch. Um, for, I don't know, $800. I don't know. Why Edna Millet said, my candle will not last the night.

Uh, my candle will not last the night. Colin. Uh, is that because it burns at both ends? Because it burns at both ends. Nice job. Sorry. What is?

Yeah. Yeah. Finally, for one million dollars. Quite a scale. From $20 to a million. Famous command that followed, men, you are all marksmen. Colin again. Is this don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes?

It is, yes. You're all marksmen. Don't fire until you can see the whites of their eyes. He said that. What is it? It says Putnam said that. It's very poetic and very violent. at the same time. It really is. It's kind of

funny because it's like, oh, you're all marksmen. You're all good at shooting. Right. But I do not trust you to use these bullets until they are very close to you. All right, good job, brains. And also, it is time for our correction segment. We lovingly

call it. Um, actually. We have a couple of um, actuallys and they're all entirely my fault. I apologize. Wow. So we had a couple, we had an island's quiz where you had to locate famous islands that we probably don't know where they are. Or in our case, fail to locate.

I know. It was very embarrassing. It's good we get to talk about it some more. So my mistake was I was unsure where the border is. South of Indonesia is where India Ocean starts. We had a couple islands such as like Christmas Island and Bali that are in that area, and I actually said it was specific. Actually, it's Indian.

So I apologize. If you do a Google image search, you can actually see the deliomsia. delineation of where all the oceans end or the maritime order. Yeah, which is actually, I think, pretty handy in trivia and also in pub trivia to know where exactly they end. Another, actually, last episode, I had a language company names based on foreign language, and you have to identify what foreign language it was of these famous companies. The game company, Idos, came up, and I was like, oh, Idos and Ethos are kind of sister words, and I said they were Latin.

They're actually Greek. I am sorry. So we did get that, right. So Dana and Chris were actually right. I say Greek, too. Oh, okay. Okay. So also, Colin, just, just, I'm actually, I actually.

I'm actually. We're through the looking glass here. Ethos and Idos, Greek. Okay. There you go. I am sorry, everybody. But thank you for all the people who wrote in and pinpointed that. Otherwise, I wouldn't have seen the ocean borders.

I think it was really fascinating, especially for a geography. No, that's cool. Yep, there you go. Right on. So since this show started, since we created Good Job Brain, a lot of people somehow misread our show title as Good Job Brian. And that was the reason why a lot of people started downloading the show, which also caused me to not only, you know, we have Good JobBrain.com, but just in case I also got Good Jobbrien.com and it redirects to Good JobBrient.com. It makes me so happy that we have. We have that. It really does.

And that gets a lot of hits. A lot of people type in, good job, Ryan.com. And so that kind of, that just weird tidbit inspired today's topic. And we are going to talk about the weird corners of the internet. Interesting origins, stories, quizzes about the World Wide Web. This show could not exist without the internet. I know. It is funny to think about this thing that is like so fundamental to like, A, what we're doing right now.

And, like, my job and all of our jobs. Yeah. Like, it didn't exist our entire lives. Like, there was a point not too very long ago when it just wasn't even a thing. It's amazing. We never fight about facts anymore because you can always just look it up. Before it was a mystery, you kind of had to go to the library, use the dewey decimal system. What's that?

Yeah, it was a lot of hassles. So maybe you just never knew the answer to the questions you had. Yeah, often on the playground, just, oh, my brother says, you know, well, all right. All right, that settles it. His brother's older than we are. He's great. He knows, yeah. It definitely sounds like a credible source.

So I'm going to go with that. And that's true. I mean, we couldn't have, I guess, I don't know, how would you make a podcast in days before the internet? You would go on the radio. Yeah. You would go on the radio. Right.

You can make a, like a cassette and send it to your own. Stuff in people's mailboxes. Yeah. Oh, that's true. So is it a mixtape? No, I just sit in front of a microphone and I talk about things I find interesting. You're like, oh. Okay, we're going to throw this right in the garbage.

And so this week is our ode, our love letter to the Internet and made everything possible. Surf it, scroll, it, pose it, pick it, cross it, crack it, Twitch, update it, name it, rid it, tune it, print it, scan, it, send it, fax, we name it, touch it, ring it, pay it, watch it, turn it, leave it, stop format it. Technologic. So it has often been said that the... By who? Citation needed I have read There we go

I have read many times That the killer app Of the internet is email Oh yes aside from porn Yeah Well I mean it maybe is a family of email Good good old fashioned simple email Email in fact predates the internet

As we know it In spirit of fundamental Favorite Things of the internet I put together a great Grab bag quiz, all about the wonderful world of email. So get ready for the email quiz here. Oh, no clever title? Get your, uh, oh, you know, I didn't have time to think of a bad title.

Email e-quiz. Oh. Okay, okay. Yeah, this is why I don't crowdsource my title names. How about this? We'll call it ICC what you did there. Oh. Wow.

So please get your buzzers ready. And chime in when you think you have the answer. All right. This first one is a two-part question. And I think we've had the first part of this at Pub Quiz before. This is a good one just to know in general. Sure. Who was the first U.S. president to send an email?

Chris. William Jefferson Clinton. That was, in fact, Bill Clinton sent the first email by a president in 1998. So for the second part of the question, for impressive bonus credit, with what famous American was Clinton emailing when he sent his first email? Oh, Chris knows. Can I guess?

Yes. Chris knows. Yeah, take a guess. Take a guess. Henry Kissinger. No, not Henry Kissinger. He was never famous. This person was famous for two very distinct roles as a famous American in his life.

Who is it? It's John Glenn. Yes. Oh. Interesting. Yes. The right stuff. Former astronaut.

From the movie. Yeah. That guy. Yeah, the guy from the movie. Yes, former astronaut, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 and then later a U.S. senator. So at the time, you may remember in 1998, he was famously on a mission out in space. He was aboard the discovery for a nine-day mission. How old was he?

He was 77. Yes. He was the oldest American to go up into space. He lobbied hard to get it. And it was kind of a nice little sort of bookend, you know, to being one of the first astronauts and then going up again. Right, right, right. So he initiated the conversation. He basically said, hey, I want to, I want to email with President Clinton.

And they had been using email aboard space missions leading up to that. Makes sense. Yep. So, you know, Clinton, I think wisely realized, I can't turn down John Glenn's request for email in space. He had never emailed before that. He had never emailed. It's security. Security concerns.

Yeah. For the White House. Clinton has said that that was one of the reasons. Document retention and security and all kinds of things. So what did they talk about? You know, Obama had to give up his Blackberry when he went into office because he was just using his personal email address for all this stuff. Fair enough. It was not even on an official White House machine.

Bill Clinton was visiting some friends in Arkansas. The friend essentially lent him the machine to, yes. It was a Toshiba satellite laptop. I've seen a picture of it. It's approximately the thickness of a phone book. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They sold it this year.

They did. They sold it for $60,000 a little bit at auction. Wow. Yes. And for you younger listeners, a phone book is a object that old people use to measure a thickness of things. Several hundred pages. Yes. It is a thickness calibration device.

Like close to a Harry Potter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a translation stale from phone book to Harry Potter. Right, right. Sliding steel. And is it like order of a phoenix or how?

Half blood prints. Depends on what town you live in. Yeah, yeah, it depends. The Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth II, is no stranger to email herself. In fact, she sent her first email even earlier than Bill Clinton did. So this will be a closest to the answer wins type of question. In what year did the Queen of England send her first email? And I'll give you a hint.

I'll give you a hint. It might be earlier than you think. Oh, okay. 1985 Karen says 85 1982 Chris says 82 91

Dana says 91 it was 976 yes early early it was on a visit to a research station science and technology station

operated by the Ministry of Defense as with Bill Clinton's first email safe to assume she had a little bit of help setting it up and getting it ready But, yeah, she sent a message from the Army Base Station in 1976. It took two weeks to die. The exact details of the communication are a little bit lost. But, yes, so Queen Elizabeth getting it done early on in the days of technology.

Does the Pope have an email account? Does Pope Francis have an email address? Karen. I say yes, because Pope Francis is a quote. cool cat. Oh. If he has Twitter. Are we talking official or personal?

Yes. We're talking an official. An official pope email? You can interpret it however you like. I'll go with yes because they have an official Pope Twitter too. Yeah. I say yes because you need an email account to a sign up for Twitter. And he has a Twitter account.

No. According to the Vatican, although he does tweet, Pope Francis does not in fact have an email account. He, according to his aides, he likes to receive, quote, old-fashioned

letters. Right. If the Pope did have an email address, it would blow up. Like, it would just... Oh, your grandma would CCM

on every chain letter. Yeah. Send it to 10 people and one of them to the Pope. That's true. That's true. That would be so cute.

Google's email service. I like to call it Gmail. You know, that's what the kids call it. Oh, yeah. You appreciate. Is one of the most

popular free email systems. It's hard to believe it's been around for over 10 years. It's I, that seems to go by very quickly from my perspective. And even from the beginning, a big part of its appeal was they gave you so much storage space for email. Just order of magnitude more than existing services at the time. And they rolled it out on April 1st. They announced it on April 1st. And a lot of people thought it was a joke. Yeah. They're like one gigabyte of storage. No way. Well, the other one, Google. This will be another closest to answer wins.

tell me if you were to start a virgin, fresh, brand new Gmail account right now, today, how much online storage space would you have access to for your various rants and cat pictures and podcast notifications? Like as in your own account or percentage of a new Gmail account? Yeah, yeah, in terms of gigabytes, let's say. Closest to the pin? 15. Karen says 15.

Oh, I think it is 15. Chris says 15. Don't know. Dennis says don't know. It is 15. Yeah. Yes. I know because I'm getting close.

And it's all just attachments. Yeah. Or somebody sends you like a, you know, two megamide attachment. Or I send myself stuff like just in case. Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

What well-known TV character was famously revealed to have the email address, Chunky Lover 53 at AOL.com. What was that? Was this Kramer? It is not Kramer. Karen. Is it George from Seinfeld? It is not George.

It is not a Seinfeld character. Chunky Lover 53 at AOL.com. This was revealed in a 2003 episode of The Simpsons. That is Homer's address. Chunky lover. Chunky lover 53 at AOL.com. One of the writers for the show registered it before the show. Just to make sure it existed.

You know, as a lot of TV shows will do. You've got to make sure to do that before you throw out your fake website. His plan originally was, you know, to write back to anybody who happened to send an email to Homer, you know, in character. After the show aired, it was almost immediately at max capacity in the inbox. He just was flooded. He was overwhelmed. They did try for a while to answer everything back in character, but you had to just, yeah, abandon that at first. Wow.

All right. Last one. We'll close it out here with a writerly style question. according to the New York Times style guide, which dictates, obviously, all punctuation and style in the New York Times. What is the preferred form for the word email? Is it E-Hifin mail or E-M-A-I-L, no hyphen. Are we all?

Jesus. I wonder if it's been changed at some point because I know, like, for us it wired for a while. It was E-Dash-Mail. I don't know if we still actually. do that or not. I don't really have the occasion to type email a lot. How about New York Times? I'm going to say E-dash-Mail. They finally changed last year. It was just up until 2013, New York Times House style was E-hyphen mail. Yeah. He used to have to be capitalized.

That's right. That's right. They were one of the last major publications to really make the shift to email, all one word, no hyphen. They joined the AP style guide, which had changed in two. For where I work, e-sports is a big deal. I don't think this is an AP-style thing, but we, as a corporate decision, decided to, well, what do we call esports? Is it e-dash sports? Or is it small-e, one word, big-s-esports? Is it big-e-small-s-s-one word? Yeah.

And now it's just e-sports. No hyphen, no intercaps? Really? No intercaps anymore. Esport. Esport. Esport. It's all those es-s-4.

All right, good job, guys. I won't accuse any of you of emailing it in. I see, see what you did there. Oh, I'll send you up. I was unwilling. I'm not going to give it to you. So I have prepared a segment inspired by something that always destroys us at PubTrivia. We get, man, we never get these right.

And it's really interesting. And we're always like, we should. study this, but we never, we never really did until now, because I studied it. So I remember once one of our pub trivia questions was, I think the first of this kind of type of question was, if you type, www.books.com, where will that take you? Where does it redirect to? And I think we had a big discussion. We're like, well, this seems like the obvious choice is Amazon. Turns out it's Barnes and Noble. Books.com redirects you to Barnes and Noble. And then we had another question probably a year after, which is we're at a soup.com, take it with multiple choice. And if you think that,

if you think that books.com engendered a lot of arguments. Imagine the argument over soup.com. And I think the, at least they gave us the multiple choice. It was, was it Campbell's, was it Nor, K-N-O-R, or was it like a progresso? Yeah. And, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, uh, and, uh, We're like, well, it seems like the obvious answer is Campbell's. Turns out it is not obvious again. It is NOR. Soup.com takes you to NOR.com, which is dehydrated soups and sauces. And then, last week at Pub Quiz Finals, the finals, the grand championship finals was where does coffee.com take you?

And we're like, all right, we learned our lesson. It seems like it is not going to be the. obvious answer, which is Starbucks. We're like, okay, it must be maybe something like coffee brands that you buy. So like a really popular house. Turns out it was none of that. It was

Pete's dot com. It was Peets.com. Silicon Valley. Yeah. Pete's dot com started in Berkeley. Early on. So here, I found a couple of these generic names redirects. I want you guys to talk about what you think of it is. Yes.

I did. Okay. I did. Took me a while because a lot of these are parked their squatters or you know like I was trying to sell it for like a million dollars basically or that company is like diets.com is diet's dot com right because once you get that brand name right you just kind of roll like cars.com right yeah yeah car dot com and cars dot com so these are definitely redirects to famous companies and uh you know let's talk it out talk it out Let's talk about it out. A group exercise.

Most of the time is not the obvious answer. Superheroes.com. Oh, Marvel or DC, right? I mean, who is more on the ball? Marvel or DC? That's really what this question is asking. Exactly. Talk it out that way. Oh, no, one of them, oh, no, they share it jointly, right?

I think they did, and I think they agreed to share the term superheroes jointly. Yeah, but who has the web? Who has the domain? Well, she said they're not obvious. Okay, so is it Marvel or DC? It's one of those. It's one of those. I'm going to guess Marvel.

I guess Marvel. I guess DC, just to be on the other side of it. It is DC. Oh, okay. DC. All right. News.com. Oh, news.com.

Oh, man. Is it like Rupert Murdoch, Fox? News Corp? Or was it like Yahoo? Or was it one of the early, like early web aggregation properties? It's like, oh, man, I know this. Oh, wow. I do tons on the right track.

Is it like C-Net? Is it one of those? It is C-Net. Oh, that's why I know this. Yeah, C-N-It. All right, let's do salad.com. Oh, oh, is this Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing? Yes.

Yes, I've read this before. Which is kind of like, I want you to get a salad. It takes you to ranch dressing. It's good. It's very good. They're kind of synonymous with eating a salad in America. All right. Right. Kid.com.

There is a logic behind this. Kid.com. Maybe like Toys R Us. Well, I mean, that would be too easy. I feel like it's going to be trickier. A logic behind it. Kid.com. Is it Chuckie Cheeses?

No. Something with goats. No. Goat skin gloves. There's something with a title called Kid. Uh-huh. A title called? Well, that was a Chuck E-Chi.

Yeah. So, kid.com takes you to movies. Dot Disney.com. There was a movie called The Kid starring Bruce Willis. Oh. And that, I mean... And for that they got. I think Kid.com was probably the movie destination, and now that's been a while.

Oh, my gosh. Just redirects you to movies. com. How did they get that? On the ball. On the ball. All right. Game.com, singular.

Game. It's a... Hasbro? Correct. It is... Hasbro. Beautiful.com. Sephora?

Mabeline? Nope, nope. Okay, so not Sephora and a Mabelene. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's cheese with it. Beautiful.com. Are we in the right ballpark? Avon, let's think more corporate.

Avon? No. Oh, is it the Dove? Did Dove have the... Larger than Dove? Mary Kaye cosmetics? Larger. Larger.

Like, go up. Procter and Gamble. Proctor and Gamble. Procter & Gamble Company owned Cover Girl Max Factor, Pantin, Ole. All right. Celebrity.com. People Magazine. No. Us magazine.

No. Entertainment Weekly. TMZ. There is another company that's also called Celebrity. Oh, Cruise. Oh. Celebrity.com redirects you to Celebrity Cruise Live. So very, very lucky that they got that.

Yeah. And similarly, in the same vein, hotel.com. It doesn't go to hotels.com? It goes to hotels. Okay, I was wondering, yeah. Well, you know that, like, Google, you've heard of this. It was mentioned earlier in the show. I had time to look it up since then.

Yeah, if you type in Google. It goes to Google. Like, if you type in 3-0s, 4-0s, 5-0s, I tried this once, and you had to get to, like, 7 or 8 or 9 before, like, somebody else has stole it. Oh, wow. somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would love it if it was just one person, like, from like 100 to 100 zeros.

Some dude just had like 19. Yeah, yeah. I've taken this one to my grade. Happy.com. Happy. McDonald's. Yeah. No.

Happy.com. This is a very good move on their house. Wow. Okay. Very good move on the park. So it's not like Budweiser or something. No, no. Happy.

Hallmark. Is it Walgreens? It is Walgreens. Walgreens at the corner of Happy and Healthy. So I looked at, I don't know if you guys noticed. In San Francisco, at least, Walgreens had a really big marketing. Yeah, they're opening more stores. They had a rebranding.

Yeah, the rebranding is like almost a supermarket. You know, there's some places that have fresh salads. Happy.com doesn't take you to Walgreens storefront. It takes you to a page that says Walgreens have acquired Happy Harries, which is a farmer. seat. I've never heard of it. So maybe they had it. It could be Happy Harry's had happy.com. Walgreens also owns

Drugstore.com. And Duane Reed. Yeah, Duane Reed. Also, so. I remember the more on the East Coast. Big in New York City. Yeah. So I wasn't really making any kind of decision whatsoever if I went into Walgreens versus Dwayne Reed every time I was in New York City. Nope. Nope. Same store.

Gosh darn it. And let's end it on this note. This is not really a quiz thing. But I found this really interesting. Pokemon obviously takes you to Nintendo's Pokemon destination. Pikachu.com takes you to the Pikachu character. Because, you know, of course the Pokemon site has, like, bios for all the Pokemon's. Yeah, all 7,000. So I was like, okay, do they own every single Pokemon name.com?

They don't own all. But the famous ones, jigglypuff, Pikachu.com, goes to their, their, not only Pokemon site, but their character bio site. Teamrocket.com also takes you to Pokemon So I was trying those out Yeah, because they made all those names up And they tried to make them all super unique In like 1998 When they brought the game out in the U.S.

So of course, there's a lot of, yeah Right, because those are unique games. By 98, you know, you probably start registering these URLs for your product. This really was just me in putting random things into the URL Like salad, beautiful, happy. It was like snacks,

beer, chip, facts, quiz. A lot of them are either squatters, a lot of them are actual sites that kind of roll with it. Yeah, so all those dot com names got snapped up real fast. And dot com is a top level domain. So it's a top level the way.edu is, dotgov, dot us for the United States, dot CA for Canada. So I have a quiz for you guys about very popular generic country code top level domain names.

So basically people sometimes use. these country codes in order to hack, make their name say something. I thought about that. Good job bra. Yeah. Do you know where that is? India. India, I believe.

But I didn't want to call it good job bra. Good job bra. Yeah, for example, Google does g-o-o.g-l. And G-L is the country code for what? Guatemala? No. Oh, that's good. That's good.

It is Greenland. Greenland. Yeah. It's hard to think of every country. country. Every country. Yeah. I'll try not to make this too complicated as I explain it, but basically Google has these search

algorithms. They have rules for what kinds of searches you get back based on where you live and what country you're in. Some of these countries are used so much for hacking the names that they're in the global generic search algorithm. Okay, okay. So basically if you were, if you lived in Greenland and you were searching for things that were relevant to your interest as a Greenlander, you get lots of .GLs.

Google has to figure out what is really relevant to your interests as a Greenland and what they're just using as goo.g.L. Yeah. Google has a list of country codes. And I'm going to describe the country or where it's located. They're mostly small countries that do this, kind of what it's used for and for the name hacking or for why it's a generic country code. Because different countries have different policies, right, on whether or not they allow people to buy these domains. And some countries are like, everybody. who wants one can have one you make up the gross natural part like for our country you know

this is fine we will take your money yep but then some countries are like no you have to actually have a business here to use it we're preserving right let's buzz in okay this is a landlocked micro state in southwestern europe and it's located in the eastern pyrenees mountains and bordered by spain and France, and its name, its letters, are used for advertising sites. Karen. .ad for Andorra? Yes. Yeah.

Dot ad. Dot ad. Dot ad. This is marketed as a domain for businesses, and it is a country in Central America. Is it Belize? Belize. Yeah. Biz.

Business. So this one is a country in the country and the northwest part of South America, and it's bordered by Panama. It's to the east of Venezuela and Brazil. Uh, Karen. Costa Rica. Nope. Columbia.

Oh. Co. Yes. Dot co. O.co. Oh, dot co. Yes. A.co.

T.co. T.co. Amazon, Google, and Twitter. Yeah. This one is popular with DJs. That's all I'm going to tell you. Oh, okay. Djibouti.

Yes. Jibouti! Yeah. It works on so many levels. Oh, my God. That's awesome. This one is popular with radio stations. It's an independent sovereign nation that is spread across the Western Pacific Ocean.

Popular with radio stations. R-D-R-L-P. A-A-M. FM. F-M-M-M-F-M-M. F-R. F-R-M-M-M-M-M-M-R. Yes, Federer.

States of Micronesia. Oh, like last. Last.com. Okay, I find this one fascinating. It was mostly evacuated in 1973, and there's only one, like, a toll that has population there, but they do have a domain name for it. And it's really popular with new startup companies and open source projects, and it is in the British Indian Ocean territory.

Well, is it I.O. I know a lot of it, but I don't know. I don't know what it stands for. It's the British Indian Ocean Territory. Almost nobody lives there. Yeah. Dot I.O. Yeah.

Is I. Is I.O. just on and off? Is that what? Input output. Input output. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So this one is marketed for a Southern California city, also used for domain hacks and French and Chinese, from a country that's landlocked in Southeast Asia. Karen. Laos. Yeah. That's pretty lucrative. It's so specific and yet. Such a huge market.

Yeah, no, it is. Yeah, dot L.A. This one is marketed for personal websites, and it is a country in southeastern Europe. Karen. Oh. Dot me. Yes. And it is Macedonia.

No. Montenegro. Yes. Yeah. It is. You know, it's funny because their old domain name used to be dot you. Why you? You and me.

Yeah. And now they became me. Yeah. Because it was Yugoslavia. Is that why? part of Yugoslavia. This one is for websites for Microsoft and Mississippi and

the New York Times. Oh. Dot MS. Yeah, dot MS. Which is... Give us a continent. Yeah, yeah. It is located in the Caribbean.

It is a British overseas territory. Aruba, Jamaica, Ur-a-M-S. Not in Maldives. It's located in the word islands. I'm singing in the Kokoam. She's going to get there eventually. It sounds like a fancy alcohol.

It does. The name of it. Montserrat. Yes. That was the hint she needed it. That was right over the edge. Okay. That was,

and it's in Coca-mo. You got it. I'm like, it's not going to be in Coca-mo. It is. Awesome. I want to catch a glimpse. Okay. This one is marketed for seniors.

Websites for seniors. seniors. It is a country in the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America. South America. Yeah. For seniors. Yeah. Surinon. Yes. E. No. S.N. S.R. Oh. Gosh. Wow.

Surinone. That was good. That's really interesting. Yeah. The fact that it makes sense. Yeah. It's got to have to separate them and filter them out. But you got to be lucky because that. That's your country name. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah, the countries that ended up with like CZ.

Crapo domain names. Yeah. Nobody wants to use, yeah. Yeah. All right, let's take a quick break. A word from our sponsor. You can spend less time staying in the know about all things gaming and get more time to actually play the games you love with the IGN daily update podcast.

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to remember me by. This article caused Daryl Zannick to hit the roof. Actress Ruth Roman followed that up with playing a foil to Betty Davis in Beyond the Force. I mean, if you can stand toe to toe with her, boy. And she does because she plays the daughter of the man that Betty Davis kills out in the hunting trip. And it's directed by King Vidor, so he's no slouch. How do you go wrong with that? Speaking of the Oscars, talking about what I call beginner's luck, it's all about the actors and actresses who won an Oscar on their very first film.

Get your fix of Old Hollywood from Stephen N on the podcast from Beneath the Hollywood Sign. And we're back. You're listening to Good Job, Brain. this week we're talking about the internet. And even before the internet, Karen, there was ARPA net, which sounds kind of scary. Grandpa Colin. Maybe a little scary in its own way. It was ARPA was started by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was a division of the Department of Defense, basically, the United States Department of Defense.

And they put the money and time and resources into building ARPANET, which was really, in most true ways, the forerunner of our modern internet. Okay, like proto. Yeah, it really was the proto. It was going to get... Biggest took all seven computers in the world. That was easy-peasy. In the early days, it was. It was a handful of interconnected computers, you know, at universities and military installations.

And, of course, this was also the birthplace of email. As I mentioned at the top of the show, email predates the internet. So here's where email really came into its own. So prior to the rise of, like, networked computers, you know, you still had a need to send people messages. And so there were a lot of programs that could do this kind of thing all the way through the 1960s in various states. If you were at MIT or the Army or Caltech, anywhere where there's a lot of computer research going on, you might have a little program called mailbox or a little program called send message. So user to user. So when you would write the message and then when Bob

came in three days later to use his time at that computer, he would get the message. Am I right on the bullet? At its most basic level, absolutely. Yep, yep. And, you know, you can imagine once you start connecting computers and computer systems to other computers and computer systems, it gets a little more complicated. Because, you know, not only do I have to get the message across the network to the other computer, but now I need to make sure, like, oh, there might be a username Chris on this machine and a username Chris on that machine. And how do we, how do we handle this? Programmer Ray. It's not two Chris's who use computers.

Get out of town. Couldn't possibly be. Programmer Ray Tomlinson is generally credited with inventing the modern form of email as we know it. Sort of like what he put together looks the most like our current email system, including notably he was the first one to use the at symbol. And the at symbol, of course, has a very rich history now forever tied up with email. And he picked the at symbol for a couple of reasons. Yeah, hold on. That was my question.

Before emails, the at symbol must have existed. It did, right? Yeah. It did. What was it used for? Well, we'll talk about this. We'll talk about this. So the first reason, I mean, this seems simple.

Now, the first reason that he chose the at symbol as the separator was, well, it was already on the keyboard. Yeah. You know, it was crucial to him, you know, like the goal of was to build an open system that anybody around the world could theoretically use. You don't want to come up with some funky character that maybe is only on your weird keyboard. So it was a standard character.

And so why was it on the keyboard already? Oh, and just as an aside, that really is the most common name for it. It's just the at sign. There are in other languages and other countries around the world, there are a lot of very colorful names for it. You know, monkey's tail or cat's tail, worm or pig's tail. Oh, I thought it was a donut. Yeah, yeah, we just...

But like how a hashtag is pound sign or optothor. Yeah. The a hole. It's the asterisk. There's nothing to say. Yeah, everyone knows. Yeah. There's a little more stodgy name for. Sometimes it was called the commercial at because so it originally started life as a shorthand just for the word at. If you were, well, I'll go back to the middle ages. If you were, you know, transcribing documents and texts all day long, writing text, translating, you know, you would have as many short hands as you could fit in. It eventually did kind of find its way into commerce and markets, you know. I mean, as Dana was just saying, you know, it's you go into a market. It would say 10 items at 195. Right.

Did you know in 2004, on the 160th anniversary of the first public Morse code transmission, they officially added the at sign to the Morse code character set, the official formal Morse code character set. This was the first time they'd added a new character, a new symbol to the set since World War I. This was a big deal to finally, okay, we need a separate standalone character for this. Imagine like your ship is in danger, like SOS, you know, email me at, like, literally. Yeah, why would you send a telegram? Hashtag, hashtag awkward.

There's no official entry for exclamation point in the Morse code library. It has letters, numbers, some punctuation, no exclamation point. Honestly, if you're, if you're sending out Morse code, you're probably, no, you're probably already pretty excited about whatever it is. It's like, we all got telegraph. It's all in caps. Like SOS, the exclamation point is implied. Yeah, right, right. I put it in all caps.

You just type really hard. But yes, that is how important the symbol has become, that even a technology as old as Morse code has had to adapt. Are you dreaming about becoming a nurse, or maybe you're already in nursing school? I'm Nurse Mo, creator of the straight A nursing podcast, and I want you to know that I'm here for you. I know nursing school can be challenged.

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And we got one more internet-licious quiz. Chris, serve it up. Here you go. This quiz is titled, I made a website. In the early days of some websites, they began perhaps as something smaller or something with a different name than they eventually turned into. And, of course, we're really only talking about the last, like, 20 years. Like, this is not really a gradual process. You may even remember using some of these websites when they were in sort of their old incarnations. Wow. So if I were to say, what popular website began?

with the name the Facebook, you would say Facebook, yes. All right. This was originally called Auction Web. Karen. eBay. eBay. Yes. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, had an early web consultancy called Echo Bay Technology Group.

And he attempted to register in 1995, Echo Bay.com. Somebody had already gotten to it. Wow. And he shortened it to eBay. Now, eBay.com was like Pierre Omidyar's website. He had the stuff about his consultancy firm. He had a really big page at eBay.com about the Ebola virus, which was just in the news. He was just really into it.

And he collected, remember, this is like 1995. This is his personal site. He just collected all this information about the Ebola virus. Like, it wasn't, there wasn't a lot of information out there. He had that. And then he added, as part of it, auction web. This website was originally called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web

Colin That is Yahoo! That is Yahoo! Oh, Jerry Yang! Jerry Yang and David Philo were grad students And they called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web That's really wild. And they renamed it to Yahoo because they liked the word Yahoo And also Yahoo stands for, does anybody want to guess this?

I think this was also a back formation but I think yet another hierarchical online organization. Very close. Yeah, yet another hierarchical, officious oracle. Ah, okay. But it was a backerdeme for sure, yes, okay. This website began its life as Those Eyes. It was a list of actresses with beautiful eyes.

Weird. Yeah, right? IMDB. IMD. Wow. So it began as a, oh, creepy. It began as a Usenet posting in rec. dot arts dot movies in the news group

but basically would you let people on the internet just go to one place to just have a discussion so one of the posters kind of just put together a list of like actresses with amazing eyes and other people just sort of jumped in to like make other lists just lists of directors movies list every movie

because the information wasn't on the internet at this point and so then in 1990 that is when they pulled all these lists together into a searchable, a database. A database in 1990 called the Internet Movie Database. And it went on the web in late 1993. Hotwired. What originally started as hotwired, Karen.

Hotwire.com? Hotwired. Dot, Wired.com. Wired.com. Wired. Yes. No, that's my guess. Is it wired?

Yes. It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who's on first? I don't know. Third base. Hot, hotwired.com was the original, not only was it the original website of Wired. Also hosted the first banner ad.

Wow. First banner ad. It was for AT&T. Wow. You guys are online marketers. You're like, what? The first banner was there? And it was one of these 60 Pins.

souls wide. And it's the three-quarters of a one of these days. First banner ad, hopwired.com, now wired.com. That is a good one. Well,

at least it wasn't Punch the Monkey. I know. It's like one secret, one weird secret. People lose 20 pounds in a week. And it was,

yeah, and it was a virus. So, by what brand name is the company formerly known as X.com, best known as

today. That is the letter X.com. I got a good... I'll tell you that I use this today. I use it quite a bit. And I think I may have even used it back when it was X.com. When I was first told about it, it was X.com. Who was this? X.com. You still use it. Yep. Is it Craigslist? It's not Craigslist.

Don't know. If you type in X.com today, it redirects you to eBay's corporate page. Why? Why, indeed. What is it? X.com is PayPal. PayPal. PayPal.

PayPal was a product of a company called Confinity. X.com also ran an internet early, very early internet payment site. They merged, and they were calling the whole thing X.com, but then it was like, it sounded a little too sexy. So they changed the whole company. company to PayPal. Yeah, I don't want my money to be involved with anything that seems wrong. Like X means wrong. Yeah, that's true.

That's a good point. Yep. And finally, what company was originally known as Twitter, T-W-T-T-R? Never heard of it. Let me think. So, yes, originally, and there are some screencaps of this page, because, again, it wasn't that long ago, Twitter was originally going to call itself, T-W-T-R, like Flickr. There was that trend for a while of just removing vowels from your name.

Yeah. I guess companies are still doing that. They are. And they abandon that pretty fast. My first post of like every single major social media service is pretty much just like, hey, I'm not doing anything here. I'm just here because people are on here and they're talking about stuff. And then later.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Listen to my thoughts. I'm Chris. Guess what. All right. And that is our show about the internet.

Thank you for joining me. And thank you guys listeners for listening in. I hope you learned a lot of stuff about the at symbol. about old websites, website domain, website redirects. And you can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and also on our website, good job, brain.com. And thanks to our sponsor, Squarespace at Squarespace.com. And we'll see you guys next week.

Bye. What does Sputnik have to do with student loans? How did a set of trembling hands end the Soviet Union? How did inflation kill moon bases? And how did a former president decide to run for a second non-consecutive term? These are among the topics we deal with on the My History Can Beat Up Your Politics Podcast. We tell stories of history that relate to today's news events. Give a listen.

My History Can Beat Up Your Politics wherever you get podcasts.