Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.What's In A Name?
When I heard that Compaq recently paid one fellow an astonishing $3.3 million to buy the Internet domain name altavista.com I panicked. How much longer could I wait to register quittner.com True, my family name is not (yet) a primary destination on the Web. But neither was altavista.com when Jack Marshall, a San Jose, Calif., electrical engineer registered it in January 1994. Happily for Marshall, Digital Computer Corp. (later bought by Compaq) launched a popular search engine in 1995 called AltaVista. By this year, some 500,000 people a day were typing altavista.com into...
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