3 ms·

The first result I get googling for ".net" is the Wikipedia article ".NET Framework". The first result I get for "COM" (or "com") is Microsoft's page on "COM: C

• cptskippy 10y ago
  It was mostly a problem when you were having a conversation with someone that went something like... "So I was installing .NET and it failed because I didn't have the right drivers for my SCSI card." "What? I've never needed disk drivers to install .NET, which version was it? 1.1?" "No, it was 2003" or... "Can you install .NET on my PC?" "Sure, done" "Where's Word and Excel?" "What?"
• int_19h 10y ago
  This is after it became popular, and Google (I assume) just special-cased it. Back when it first came out, though, typing that into any search engine we had back then would mostly just give you tons of domain names that end with ".net". Then also, we had Office .NET, Visual Studio .NET (with Visual Studio .NET 2003 added later), and pre-release versions of what was to ship asWindows Server 2003 were known as Windows .NET Server for a while. Web services (the SOAP and XML kind) were the next big thing back then, at least as far as Microsoft was concerned, and so the entire software stack was promoted as conceptually centered around that - hence the .NET name. Kinda ironic, what with the rise of cloud computing later, when .NET brand was already toned down to refer to the framework specifically, and the consequent need to invent "Azure".
  • erikbye 10y ago
    Back then I just used MSDN.