I found this thread because someone mentioned my brother and I in the very first post.
There were those registering domain names as far back as 1986. What changed everything is when Bill Clinton, in 1993, opened up the informational superhighway for commercial purposes. That got me thinking about the World Wide Web, and why wouldn’t addresses be important as they were in the real world.
I started looking into it around 1993 but didn’t really become good at it till 1994. At first, I didn’t understand what the DNS was and how it related to a server and a domain name. Also at the time, to register a domain name would take weeks. They were literally two guys that handled a database on a computer and a spreadsheet. I was actually having a hard time and making errors on the registration form and not securing the domain name. 1993 was more or less a learning experience of trial and error for me. I eventually did register powwow.com. I only needed one name, because that was the name of the business that I owned-Powwow Productions. My business centered around music production. I was creating digital files using a workstation to record music. I wanted a way to distribute it online.
I would perform a whois search, using telnet, to find out if a domain name was available, most were not. I passed on names like Hollywood.com, Toys.com and many more because most names were all available. Only six months later, when I look back at those names did I realize they were all being registered up. That’s when the lightning bolt hit me, and I started registering other names.
I would come to realize that there were around five people in the world that were securing great name portfolios for the future.
Let’s not forget Scott Day. He was also in early and got most of his registrations in the summer of 1997 during “the big drop.”
As a sidenote. I remember when I was developing domain names in 1996. I would put up a page with a logo with an email address like
[email protected]. Back then there was no spam. Every response you got from around the world came from someone that was someone looking for a response. You could feel the movement of the domain name across the world and the responses they would generate from email. Those times will never be repeated, but it was interesting to experience them at the beginning.
I am thinking of writing an article on that period from1993 to 1999 for Traveler.com. We have a “time traveler” series that we’re doing on Waco next month. If I write the WWW article, I’ll be sure to post it here.
Things sure were different back then.
Not Dicker!
