In midtown Manhattan there is a restaurant called the JUdson Grill. In and of itself, this is exciting to me, but those double capital letters tell a better story still. They are a reference to old telephone exchanges, when those letters stood for numbers. JUdson used to be its own exchange, the 58 exchange. Years ago when people picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect them to JUdson Grill they said, "Get me JUdson-2-5252." Very exciting.

But the exchange whose name I share has gone the way of all the other exchanges. Numbers have taken the place of names and now that cell phones have rendered area codes meaningless and essentially put an end to memorizing phone numbers at all the idea of using words and names to delineate boundaries and help remember numbers is charmingly quaint. What may well have started out as just good advertising (no one ever forgot the exchange for the JUdson Grill) has become a piquant detail in a city of signs, a bygone capital U above a midtown restaurant.

The impression telephone exchanges left on this country is faint, indeed. Butterfield 8 is the most famous remnant of the exchange system. It was a brief organizational framework in a rapidly changing technology and it now falls squarely into the curiosities department of history.

The youthful growing pains of the Internet are not nearly as charming now, but perhaps they will in a few decades. 1-800-Flowers, the company that finally took florists national (and thank God for that) was expanding when the Internet was young. With years of effort poured into branding the number 1-800-Flowers, CEO and founder Jim McCann was not about to ditch his signature number, even if the Internet was the ideal medium for his business. And so the company is now 1800flowers.com, the 1-800 an obviously superfluous detail online. (Indeed, the company owns flowers.com, the Internet equivalent of 1-800-Flowers.) The company was named when the easy-to-remember, toll-free angle was its biggest selling point and so radio ads trumpet 1800flowers.com. If the technologies involved weren't so familiar and mundane, the whole thing could be as idiosyncratic and interesting as the JUdson Grill.

Without knowing how the Internet will evolve, I cannot tell where other pieces of detritus will pop up but the current network of domain extensions (which bears a striking resemblance to old telephone exchange system) offers great possibility for obsolescence, errata, and future nostalgia.

In the past few years, the two biggest profile additions to the sprawling mess of domain extensions have been .pro for professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc.) and .biz for businesses. The next time I see either mentioned in an ad will be the first. People are already a bit hazy on the .net and .org as it is. It was not until recently that .xxx was finally added. It seems the perfect solution for both pornographers hoping to reach customers and parents looking for a quick block on all naked web sites. But it's years too late and no established Internet pornographer wants to change their server and address to get a .xxx now. As if to further shoot itself in the foot, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has made .pro, .biz and .xxx more expensive than .com addresses. Pay more to be unfamiliar to customers!

The system of domain extensions seems intuitive but it wasn't built for human wear and tear. Even the country codes that mark foreign websites are cracking under the borderless pressure of Internet commerce. Moldova has begun leasing out its .md extension to medical-type sites eager to license names like letmebeyourdoctor.md. The United States almost wholly ignores its .us country code, opting for the singularly successful .com, even for markedly non-commercial sites such as this one. Only the strictly regulated .edu, .gov, and .mil have maintained their integrity. These layers of failure and complexity ensure that some day, some way they whole system will come down on itself. Which I look forward to. It will leave some odd little relic like the JUdson Grill (judsonmerrill.pro, perhaps).

There is something charming about the residue of these efforts to systematize young and dynamic technologies. Innovation is relentless but the detritus left in its wake does not always disappear. Those bits and pieces that stay afloat, that remain visible, look to me like quiet, happy history lessons. They are the details that don't deserve their own textbook or Kearns-Goodwin monogram but I like seeing them about, hinting at what the telephone, for example, was like when it was young.

Where I come from the exchanges were named after trees. My childhood phone was a part of the SPruce neighborhood. From now on I'm giving out my new phone number, which begins with 233, as a BEech-3 number. Hopefully some member of a future generation will, with a similar mix of nostalgia and irony, register a .pro address to market her punk band and someone savvy in 90ways Essay will write a story about the delightful and dead-end piece of Internet history that led to .pro extensions in the first place.

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