It’s a sad reality: Domain names expire every day because their registrants pass on and no one takes over the account.
In the case of ByteCraft.com, the domain was registered in 1994 by three Canadians that had formed the company “Byte Craft” in 1976. One of them was the founder, Walter Banks.
According to archived pages of their web site, Byte Craft wrote over 90 assemblers in the 1980’s, and shipped their first commercial software compiler in 1984 and their first C compiler in 1987.
Unfortunately, Walter Banks passed on in December 2019 as this memorial page states:
Goodbye Walter Banks, Byte Craft founder – Walter Banks died earlier this week. For those of you who don’t know Walter Banks, he was the founder of Byte Craft in 1976. They made assemblers, and C compilers for all those venerable 8-bit architectures. He was an important figure in our embedded industry.
ByteCraft.com expired on December 14, 2021 and it entered the domain deletion cycle. It was caught by DropCatch where it ended up being auctioned for three days. The final price was $3,161 dollars and the auction’s winner was the DropCatch account “Hillseyes.”
And this is how great brands pass on, when their owner leaves this earthly plane.
This is going to happen to Voodoo too.
It has gone MIA for so long.
This is going to happen to all of us one day…
i hope it doesn’t happen to me first.
oh, careful, she has a grenade.
I guess Walter must have used up his foresight quota starting that Byte Craft thing back when earthlings were still saving up for a mobile-calculator.