Old Internet Files

Hah, there&#x27;s my domain, from 1996:<p>REALMS.ORG<p>Admin: Diederich, Dana Dana.Diederich@GOLDINC.COM (601)374-6510 ...<p>I actually started the process of acquiring realms.org in 1994. At the time, you sent an e-mail to &#x27;a guy&#x27; in DC. It took some time, but I finally got it registered in 1995. It was, of course, a free service.

Seeing &quot;domain-contacts.txt&quot; reminded how much simpler the internet used to be. Imagine not being afraid of giving out your contact info to the whole internet!<p>I&#x27;m not sure if the people who participated at the time would ever have imagined the need for whois anonymizers and weird tricks to keep your email address from being picked up by robots and spiders.

Ah, I remember when you could get a full list of com domains from the Internic. Hell, I remember when SRI-NIC.ARPA was a root name server. I forget exactly when they stopped the ability to ftp that.<p>Interesting looking at the COM zone for August 1995 and June 1996. In August 1995, bulletproof.com, foolproof.com, and fool-proof.com were all registered - but not proof.com. Proof.com was registered February 3rd, 1996 (I applied for it the same day but didn&#x27;t get it, they must have beat me by an hour or two). By June 1996, not only were all the above registered in the proof.com namespace, but also babyproof.com, birdproof.com, crashproof.com, cyberproof.com, digitalproof.com etc.<p>Of course if I knew back in February 1996 how valuable good .com names would be in a few years, I would have registered a bunch more.

should these be shared with the internet archive?<p>Would be interesting to fill in the gaps for different countries - Ireland still has plenty of people around that probably have relevant files from the late 80s &#x2F; 90s (if they went searching)...

I like how basic his website is. Simple and familiar.

Don&#x27;t know why I didn&#x27;t register until 1997, but I guess by then it&#x27;d grown way too big to keep casual copies lying around.

I was surprised to find my name in the &quot;contacts&quot; list. I guess I&#x27;m KK35. Is that a WHOIS thing or something?

It would be fun to run a mini web crawler against these old domains, and see if any are still hosting circa 1990s content.

SOUP.ORG in the first domain.info file ... anyone know what that was? It now redirects to an actual soup place.

Ah. Hello.com<p>If only I had kept that.