Internet history : The man who gave away NYT.com for free

NYT.com

In 1994, registering a domain name was still free.

John Markoff, registered NYT.com between 3 to 5 years earlier, despite what the registration date of the three letter .com asserts.

Those were the days of the pre-commercial Internet, when domain names were still viewed as exotic, and very few had the means to access them.

Still, Mr. Markoff, a technology reporter at the New York Times, registered NYT.com for his personal email: markoff@nyt.com.

To establish a live email address, he had to use Internex, an ISP based in Menlo Park, California; the company was the first ISDN Internet service provider in Northern California.

In 1995, the New York Times went online, and Mr. Markoff offered them domain NYT.com  – for free. Surprisingly, his offer was turned down initially, opting for NYTimes.com instead.

The rest, is history.

Read the full article, at NYT.com.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Internet history : The man who gave away NYT.com for free”
  1. Join Domains says:

    A sad tale indeed

  2. Eric Lyon says:

    If he would have only been able to see the future! Weren’t there fortune tellers in the 90’s too? Maybe he should have visited one of those. Wait, nevermind, I can’t think of one instance where a fortune teller won the lottery, so I guess that idea out the window. :p

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