Introduction
Ex Ponto is a very virtual company. The name is Latin for the The Black Sea. Given that Ex Ponto, the virtual company, is located in Oslo, Norway, you may ask why that name? Have you ever tried to find a "good" .com name lately?
Actually the name has a longer story. Before exponto.com there was a little network with 2 machines and an ISDN connection and the network needed a name. So I looked over the bookshelf and there was "The poems of Exile" by Ovid. Ovid was a Roman poet sent to exile in the Black Sea Port of Tomis by Emperor Augustus himself. "The poems of Exile" consists of "Tristia" and "Epistulae ex Ponto". And the short version of them is:
- Man gets emperors wife angry
- Man gets sent to exile
- Man thinks exile is so bad that he doesn't deserve it
- Man tries very hard to get back to Rome
- Man feel sorry for himself, very sorry
- Man is stuck
The man was Ovid and he died in Tomis, the modern Constanta, in the winter of AD 17/18 after some 10 years in exile. And he really hated the place, the barbarians, the cold - I wonder what would he think of Norway?
So ponto became the name of the network, and I was happy until one Friday I suddenly decided to get my own space in this world, this one was vacant, and here I am, still happy.
