The UniPress Blog

We were recently reminiscing here about the old days and did a Web search on the history of domain names. We learned that our name 'unipress.com', which we got on July 13, 1987, is the 80th name ever registered!! (http://www.chrisabraham.com/2005/10/the_100_oldest.php
for more info.) TRW is the 79th and Dupont is the 81st, so we are in good company. The list of the first 100 domain names is at the bottom of this article.

I knew that we had been Internet users for a long time, but didn't realize that we were such trailblazers. We started using the Net soon after we opened our doors in 1983, before there were domain names.

I remember a give-away we made for a Washington, DC tradeshow in winter
1984 (at least I think it was 1984). In those days, to send an email to a person on a different computer than yours, you had to specify the full routing between your computer and the recipient's!! Typically, your site (if you were on the Net) had a connection to a local university, and hopefully so did the recipient's, because that was the only way to send and receive email. As example, if I wanted to send a message from UniPress in Edison, NJ to our UK agent (who had a link to Cambridge University) the 'To' field of the email would be something like: cambridge!columbia!rutgers!john@UnipressUk. (Note: it's been a long time since I had to address any mail like this, so I may not have done it exactly right.)

Back to the give-away at the tradeshow ... To help the community, we made a map of the worldwide Internet backbone. It was on sturdy cardboard stock and the map was very popular at the show since you really did need something like it in order to know how to route your email. During the conference a blizzard blanketed Washington, DC under more than 15 inches of snow. I made a paper hat out of one of the maps and used it for cover. When other people saw my hat, they swarmed our booth and took all the rest of the maps for the same purpose. Hopefully the hat was able to help people with their email communications too.

So, the Internet has come quite a distance since 1984!!

Writing about the Internet makes me think about Al Gore. Was he the inventor of the Internet? Did he claim to be? I did some Googling.
Here's what I learned.

(http://www.perkel.com/politics/gore/internet.html . The text below is from that page.)

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In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."

The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."

Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?"

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Look at http://www.sethf.com/gore/ for more on the Al Gore story.

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At UniPress, we happily used our Internet domain name for more than a decade without any trouble, but in 1999 we were contacted by another company, the Unipress Corporation of Tampa, FL. Since the 1920s (as I recall) that Unipress has been making laundry pressing machines. At the time, they demanded that we stop using the 'unipress.com' domain name since their company is older than ours, and they trademarked the name 'Unipress' in the 1950s. We told them that we had the right to our domain name which we had obtained in 1987, and further that they had no need for our URL -- they could get one of their own, perhaps 'unipresscorp.com.' They completely refused to consider anything except us surrendering the URL to them.

To make a very long, costly, and unpleasant story shorter, I'll tell you that after a few years in court we got undisputed possession of our domain name, and the laundry people named their Web site 'unipresscorp.com,' which was the name we had suggested to them that they use when they initially contacted us.

Justice did finally prevail, at least, although the cost for this victory was more than one year of my son's college tuition.

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Here are the first 100 '.com' domain names and their dates:

03/15/1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
04/24/1985 BBN.COM
05/24/1985 THINK.COM
07/11/1985 MCC.COM
09/30/1985 DEC.COM
11/07/1985 NORTHROP.COM
01/09/1986 XEROX.COM
01/17/1986 SRI.COM
03/03/1986 HP.COM
03/05/1986 BELLCORE.COM
03/19/1986 IBM.COM
03/19/1986 SUN.COM
03/25/1986 INTEL.COM
03/25/1986 TI.COM
04/25/1986 ATT.COM
05/08/1986 GMR.COM
05/08/1986 TEK.COM
07/10/1986 FMC.COM
07/10/1986 UB.COM
08/05/1986 BELL-ATL.COM
08/05/1986 GE.COM
08/05/1986 GREBYN.COM
08/05/1986 ISC.COM
08/05/1986 NSC.COM
08/05/1986 STARGATE.COM
09/02/1986 BOEING.COM
09/18/1986 ITCORP.COM
09/29/1986 SIEMENS.COM
10/18/1986 PYRAMID.COM
10/27/1986 ALPHACDC.COM
10/27/1986 BDM.COM
10/27/1986 FLUKE.COM
10/27/1986 INMET.COM
10/27/1986 KESMAI.COM
10/27/1986 MENTOR.COM
10/27/1986 NEC.COM
10/27/1986 RAY.COM
10/27/1986 ROSEMOUNT.COM
10/27/1986 VORTEX.COM
11/05/1986 ALCOA.COM
11/05/1986 GTE.COM
11/17/1986 ADOBE.COM
11/17/1986 AMD.COM
11/17/1986 DAS.COM
11/17/1986 DATA-IO.COM
11/17/1986 OCTOPUS.COM
11/17/1986 PORTAL.COM
11/17/1986 TELTONE.COM
12/11/1986 3COM.COM
12/11/1986 AMDAHL.COM
12/11/1986 CCUR.COM
12/11/1986 CI.COM
12/11/1986 CONVERGENT.COM
12/11/1986 DG.COM
12/11/1986 PEREGRINE.COM
12/11/1986 QUAD.COM
12/11/1986 SQ.COM
12/11/1986 TANDY.COM
12/11/1986 TTI.COM
12/11/1986 UNISYS.COM
01/19/1987 CGI.COM
01/19/1987 CTS.COM
01/19/1987 SPDCC.COM
02/19/1987 APPLE.COM
03/04/1987 NMA.COM
03/04/1987 PRIME.COM
04/04/1987 PHILIPS.COM
04/23/1987 DATACUBE.COM
04/23/1987 KAI.COM
04/23/1987 TIC.COM
04/23/1987 VINE.COM
04/30/1987 NCR.COM
05/14/1987 CISCO.COM
05/14/1987 RDL.COM
05/20/1987 SLB.COM
05/27/1987 PARCPLACE.COM
05/27/1987 UTC.COM
06/26/1987 IDE.COM
07/09/1987 TRW.COM
07/13/1987 UNIPRESS.COM
07/27/1987 DUPONT.COM
07/27/1987 LOCKHEED.COM
07/28/1987 ROSETTA.COM
08/18/1987 TOAD.COM
08/31/1987 QUICK.COM
09/03/1987 ALLIED.COM
09/03/1987 DSC.COM
09/03/1987 SCO.COM
09/22/1987 GENE.COM
09/22/1987 KCCS.COM
09/22/1987 SPECTRA.COM
09/22/1987 WLK.COM
09/30/1987 MENTAT.COM
10/14/1987 WYSE.COM
11/02/1987 CFG.COM
11/09/1987 MARBLE.COM
11/16/1987 CAYMAN.COM
11/16/1987 ENTITY.COM
11/24/1987 KSR.COM
11/30/1987 NYNEXST.COM

Until next time,

Fred
fhp@unipress.com

Posted by Unipress at 09:24 AM | Permalink

I was thinking about the Hosting service we offer that has helped so
many people. It lets customers run a full-function FootPrints system
on a computer which we maintain for them. The customer doesn't need
any servers or any IT infrastructure. We do it all. (Some customers
from larger companies which have IT capability choose Hosting anyway,
so that they can take care of their own needs without utilizing -- or
paying for -- their in-house IT services.)

One customer had no IT department so they could not have any helpdesk or
issue tracking system until they found the UniPress FootPrints Hosting
service.

Another customer had a large installation of FootPrints being used for a
CRM Service Desk running on a corporate server. Their IT Department
was charging them a lot of internal funds for using the equipment, and
furthermore they had a lot of outages. They turned to UniPress: The
Hosting fees were a lot less than their own company was charging them,
their uptime was substantially better once they switched, and they got
faster response time. This customer inputs more than 50,000 tickets
per month!

We have dozens of customers, and they are happy with the service. They
each get a full FootPrints installation, so they can have multiple
projects, they can be system administrators, etc., and we have
developed an installation 'cookbook' to get them running very
quickly. We do the setup for them (at no charge!), so they can be
installed and running without being FootPrints experts.

The more I think about the Hosting service, the more I believe that it
can be a great help to small organizations who don't have the in-house
IT capability but whose operation is complex enough to need a powerful
issue tracking system.

These customers typically are not using FootPrints for IT-helpdesk
purposes. They use it for many other 'issue tracking' needs, such as
customer service, HR, facilities management, etc.

One wonderful use of FootPrints is as the communication 'nervous
system' for a multi-location organization. The system can be run
through web screens, or FootPrints will send emails (including any
attachments), automatically record replies (including any
attachments), can act as a reminder/tickler system, and much more.

Until now, we have been 'offering' the Hosting service more than
'promoting' it. I am sure that the FootPrints Hosting Service can help
many more organizations than it does presently. We are going to start a
more active effort to promote it.

- Fred Pack, fhp@unipress.com

Posted by Unipress at 11:47 AM | Permalink

Hi. I'm Fred Pack, VP and Co-Founder of UniPress Software.

We had the idea to create a web-based help desk product in 1994 when the World Wide Web was barely in its infancy. We believed that the Web was the ideal base for a help desk / issue tracking system. Version 1 of FootPrints was launched in 1996, so our program (now 7.0) is in its 11th year of development.

From the first days of its design we knew that we weren't really
making a 'helpdesk' or 'CRM' system -- we were making a
general-purpose 'issue tracking' system -- the issues being tracked
could really be about anything.

But we also knew that the term 'helpdesk' had a meaning which people
would understand, while 'issue tracking' was much more vague and
harder for people to relate to, and in marketing the fundamental
necessity is to build a connection with the potential buyer. No
connection, no sale; no sales, no company. We needed sales of our new creation to make the effort worthwhile.

So we decided to promote FootPrints as a 'helpdesk', and this was
clearly a wise decision because our product gained market acceptance
and has prospered, bringing happiness to many, many users.

But from the first days I have had a frustration: Our program is SO
MUCH MORE than merely a helpdesk (or CRM) system. It has VERY WIDE
APPLICABILITY. Gratifyingly, many of our customers who have purchased
it as a helpdesk/CRM product have come to realize by themselves that
they can use FootPrints for much more, and they are doing so.

To encourage expansive use of FootPrints, we designed the solution to accommodate an unlimited number of "projects", which allow customers to expand the scope of their service desk, and accommodate other business needs. We also provide more than a dozen project templates to make it easy to create projects for numerous different types of business tasks. And for years we have marketed the product's versatility as a key capability that can be used widely within any organization.

In addition to help desk and CRM, there are templates in FootPrints for change management, HR purposes, facilities management, purchase order control, software development and bug tracking, asset management, and much more. FootPrints can help you track and manage just about anything, and the great news is that you don't need to be a programmer to customize it to do so, nor do you have to pay extra to create as many projects as you want. The entire setup is done via simple web screens. And you can always make your own fully custom projects - you don't have to use one of our templates.

So while we have 2,200 customers successfully using FootPrints for many types of business-critical applications, I know there are thousands of other organizations that can use this powerful tool. The possibilities are endless. We simply (but it isn't so simple!) have to continue to spread the word, and those that get it will quickly become fans.

If you are a FootPrints customer, I'd love to hear how you are using the system in interesting ways. If you are not a customer, please take a closer look at your organizational problems and see if FootPrints can help you take care of them. It probably can!

Fred Pack
fhp@unipress.com

Posted by Unipress at 11:38 AM | Permalink