Well, I shouldn't say anything bad against the sun microsystems ad campaign... but personally, I think that the "." was just a convienient domain name delimiter...

Wrong! The . in .com is actually the entire text of Dante's Inferno, compressed to, well, a dot. The . in .org is all the text from The Communist Manifesto. The . in .edu has the mass of one teaspoon of the sun's matter, but since it's not really a dot, but a representation of a dot (ceci n'est pas un point), it does no harm to your monitor. Be glad!

All other dots are, in reality, dots. In fantasy, they can be whatever you'd like, owing to the nature of fantasy. Just don't let "Them" know.

The question of The Origin of Dots (look for my new provocative work at a burnt-out computer bookstore near you around 15 October 2015) is indeed a vexing one in computer etymology.

It's reasonably obvious that the `.' came from the C / Pascal (and probably Algol, and all that lot) convention to access structure members. If I have

struct {
  /* ... */
  domain yahoo;
  /* ... */
} com;
then I access Yahoo! using the `.' operator.

But then the correct form would have to be com.yahoo. Can this mean that JANET was right?!

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