On standards.com

Before it was ours, this name belonged to one person for nearly twenty years. His name was Howard Kaikow, and it is worth a moment to say who he was.

The domain

standards.com was registered on October 13, 1992 — early, by the measure of the commercial internet. It predates paid domain registration, which did not begin until 1995, and it predates the Mosaic browser that opened the web to everyone in 1993. Kaikow registered the literal word standards at no cost, three years before anyone had to pay for a name.

It is not one of the very first .com domains — those are 1980s registrations held by old corporate brands. But 1992 is genuinely early, and it is a fitting name for him to have held, because standards were his life's work.

The man

Howard Kaikow was a computer-standards professional. His most consequential contribution is also the one most easily verified: he was the editor of the High Sierra Group Proposal — the document that became the basis for ISO 9660, the file system that let a single CD-ROM be read across Macintosh, MS-DOS, and everything else, instead of each manufacturer inventing its own incompatible layout. If you ever loaded a disc on one computer that had been burned on another, you were standing on work he helped standardize.

He spent decades inside standards committees — through ANSI, ECMA, and ISO — and by his own account was among the early members of the committee that standardized BASIC. In his later years he ran standards.com as his own consulting site and a home for small software utilities he wrote and shared freely.

The handoff

Kaikow died in 2011, and his sister, Rita, made the name available to whoever would carry it next. That is how it reached us.

To Howard Kaikow, and to Rita: thank you. We will endeavor to be worthy of the word.

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