no domain for you.

17 years ago
Stupid interweb:
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Current Music: The Start -- Trinity ♬

14 Responses:

  1. rosefox says:
    17 years ago at 2:22 pm

    Now I really want to register DIDNTYOUKNOWTHATYOUCANONLYHAVESIXTY-THREECHARACTERSINADOMAIN-NA.com.
  2. fo0bar says:
    17 years ago at 2:53 pm

    I've owned 74d.com since 2000. Does that mean I'm a millionaire yet?

    I also used to have 41.ca, the lowest-numbered, shortest domain name available to register at the time (short of moving to Xambompia and getting 1.xb). Sadly, I lost it a few years ago, as (I kid you not), the registrar handling the domain record would keep going out of business, selling their database to another registrar, which would go out of business, etc... When it came time to register one year, I couldn't actually figure out who to make the check out to.
  3. fantasygoat says:
    17 years ago at 9:41 pm

    It's hard to believe but I get people asking to buy my domain all the time - syslog.com. Who the fuck wants that piece of crap except some UNIX nerd?
  4. jwz says:
    17 years ago at 9:46 pm

    Back when dinosaurs walked the earth -- 1997 or so -- foo@bar.com was actually Mike O'Connor's email address. He used to post the funnier test messages he got. He also owned "company.com" and "corp.com". At some point, there was a Microsoft web-page-editor product that would insert default links to http://www.company.com/; they also used that in their documentation all over the place. His response to that was to change the "company.com" page to say, something along the lines of, "Hi, MS screwed up. Want to buy an ad banner? Here's some porno." It was awesome.

    Looks like he still owns bar.com, but there's nothing there. I guess he sold the others. (Wayback Machine bar.com and company.com.)

    Interestingly, foo.com was registered by one of the root-server operators in self-defense against a bad SGI sendmail config. In 1997, Michael Petry <petry@ni.umd.edu> wrote:

    You guys might want to know the real story (versus wild ass speculation)

    We run one of the root domain name servers (terp.umd.edu). During routine investigation of trafffic loading on terp we saw that lots and lots (read many requests per second) were for the lookup of relayhost.foo.com from dozens of hosts. We tracked it down to a REALLY stupid sendmail.cf that was distibuted with SGI machines. We contacted SGI via the NIC channels and got little joy from there desire to fix this problem. Their out of the box sendmail.cf had relayhost.foo.com listed with a note to change this to your relay. The sendmail was "smart" enough to try other means if the lookup of relayhost failed.

    Given the architecture of the the DNS, the queries were going to ALL root servers. To provide some relief, we worked with the nic and registered foo.com. (Note that it had been previously returned because of what I believe to be traffic problems brought on by this sendmail.cf). We setup foo.com to return 127.0.0.1 for queries. This reduced the traffic to only be directed at us (once foo.com was resolved) and allowed us to bring the issue to the forefront of some of the sendmail.cf maintainers.
    • fantasygoat says:
      17 years ago at 10:07 pm

      He should have taken the $50K for television.com.
      • jwz says:
        17 years ago at 10:16 pm

        <lj user="wtfwtf_ok"> said, in 1997 or so:

        "The guy is still trying to sell it. I bet he would still wake up every morning and look in the mirror and think 'You should have sold it for $50,000 while you had the chance,' even if that wasn't written in lipstick on the mirror by his ex-girlfriend."

        One of the finest moments of that period was when sponsor.net -- the fine folks who had "reserved" (it wasn't called "squatting" yet, they were fuckin' pioneers) ericbina.com and jimbarksdale.com and a zillion others -- changed their page to have a sad little story that went something like, "We've run out of money and we're going home. Would you like to buy our domain name?"
    • dcdan says:
      17 years ago at 12:40 am

      In mid to late nineties I remember that porn.org had the DNS entry as 127.0.0.1 so that making fun of co-workers by opening shells to porn.org and pointing to their boxes and asking what was up with that? Was a long running joke.
  5. dzm6 says:
    17 years ago at 2:06 am

    I've owned a three letter domain ("Look! No vowels!") since ... Umm ... quick whois query ... Sept 11, 1997.

    In this time I've had only one request for resale, and they didn't een haggle despite "this domain name being essential to the success of a new product rollout we're doing." I even offered to lease them some high level name on the domain - something like "promo.${DOMAIN}.com". They didn't even write me back.

    So here I sit waiting for my Great Big Offer to come in.

Comments are closed because this post is 17 years old.