[gsb]

> You could buy a .com address years before the internet existed outside the US.

The .com tld was created in 1984, at which point there had already been international links for over a decade, so that doesn't really support the argument.

[klodolph]

I thought that the links, at the time, went mostly to other networks -- ones running X.25 or something.

[mtoddh]

X.25 - that is a blast from the past. I think JANET and Autonet had gateways where you could hop from one to the other (ie, TCP/IP to X.25).