You're probably right, this was nearly 20 years ago. I only remember because my wife remembered my excitement and always used it to call me a nerd, adjusting h

You're probably right, this was nearly 20 years ago. I only remember because my wife remembered my excitement and always used it to call me a nerd, adjusting her nonexistent glasses, snorting, and say 'i was missing a dot.' In good fun. If I had to guess, I had the function that accepted the query name call a function that split on dots to do the encoding, meaning a missing trailing dot means a missing null terminator.