There are things that must remain secret because they burn. But then there are also things that stay secret solely because they are of absolutely no interest. Two guesses which sort I want to tell you about today.

Here’s the thing. If I’m on my iPhone and start to type out “radiotimes.com”, then before I’m more than a few letters into that, it autocompletes for me. So far, not a shock, not a secret. But it autocompletes as “radiotimes.beeb.com”.

There’s no such site. There hasn’t been for an extremely long time, since at least five years before the first iPhone came out. The iPhone was 2007 – happy 15th birthday, iPhone – and I worked at Radio Times until at least 2010, possibly 2012, so even if I’d never gone to the site since, I have typed or tapped or linked to radiotimes.com just about eleventy-billion times more than I ever did “radiotimes.beeb.com.”

And every single time it autocompletes that and tries to resolve the address, I am back in 1997, crossing a certain road near my then home, reading the new issue of Radio Times magazine. If I picture looking at the cover, for some reason I’m seeing a November 1996 issue with The Simpsons on it, but apparently my vivid-clear memory is out by months.

Because the reason I remember this issue at all, remember this moment crossing a certain road as I read, is that it included the news that a Radio Times website was being launched that week. You’ll never guess the address.

For completeness, let me tell you that it didn’t didn’t actually launch then, there was a week’s delay for some reason that I didn’t know then, never heard later, and/or can’t remember now.

But 25 years ago, the Radio Times went online and what I remember in my stomach is how bad the news of it coming made me feel. Given my drama obsession, adding in my writing and technology background, I read this news about an RT website and felt failure. I should have been working on that, I should have proposed that site, I should have done a dozen different things and instead I was not then and would never be involved in this site.

If only I could remember so accurately when I got involved.

It wasn’t very long afterwards, I don’t think it was only weeks, but it can’t have been many months before I was writing on the Radio Times website and working out of Woodlands, a building near Television Centre. Forget how my iPhone tries to resolve this prehistoric “radiotimes.beeb.com” address, even now, even typing to you, it takes immense effort for me to not write “RadioTimes”, without a space. Because working there, I would write radiotimes.com so very often.

Let me do so one more time. RadioTimes.com is celebrating its quarter century now and if I wasn’t there at the start, I was near the beginning and I’m proud of that. Happy birthday, RadioTimes.com.

Wait.

Okay, no, explaining the radiotimes.beeb.com address is a 90-minute lecture with slides. Let me just skip to the bit that tickled me. Overall, beeb.com was a collection of BBC Worldwide sites including Radio Times, but its longest-lasting legacy was created by staff who needed to talk/meet/vent about it (delete as applicable).

And whoever set up this private staff-only alternative to beeb.com registered the address as peep.cow. To this day I don’t know how they registered an upside-down site name, but good on them.