The Internet already existed in 1990, well before Al Gore took whiff of it.
Domain names have been registered since 1985, and although commercially the Internet was in its embryonic stages, information about domain names existed in printed format.
That’s right.
In 1990, the “Internet Manager’s Phonebook” shared all available information about domain ownership, and other important contact info about managers of domain names, and IP address ranges even.
Published in November 1990 by Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., the Internet “phonebook” contained more than 230 pages of names, IP addresses and domain names – everything that was known at the time.
It would be impossible to print one such document today, what with hundreds of millions of domain names, IP addresses and people associated with all these digital assets.
If you want to peruse the content of the Internet Manager’s Phonebook from 28 years ago, here are some usable formats:
The document arrives courtesy of the Internet Archive, and was scanned and digitized in 2011, hence the yellowing of pages. 😀
