Internet Artifacts

I jumped over to the Wikipedia page of early blogger Justin Hall to see what he's up to. He has another distinction that he can probably claim: The longest recorded gap between registering a domain and finally using it to start a business.

"In September 2017, Hall began work as co-founder & Chief Technology Officer for bud.com, a California benefit corporation delivering recreational cannabis, built on a domain name he registered in 1994."

I think domains were even free in 1994. I think the owner of rob.com told me he just had to send in a form or something back then.

That reminded me of Orkut, which was a social networking product, but created by Orkut Büyükkökten.

So he just reused his personal domain name for the product! https://orkut.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut

later, he held onto hello.com for years with a "coming soon! the next network from orkut!" Supposedly you could get an invite but I don't know anybody who ever actually used it.

This reminds me of the joke about the guy who couldn't afford a vanity number plate for his car so he changed his name to CK-16450

They were. I think it was 1995 they started charging? I had dozens of domains. There was a simple text file form you had to type over. Then they started charging $200/2yr for .com/.net/.org and a lot of us let our domains go which ended up being worth tens of millions a few years later during the boom.

(the story at the time of what killed the "free" is that Unilever mailed in 19,000 forms; one for each of their registered trademarks)