Domain Spotlight:

Domain Time Machine

Imagine a domain time machine taking you back to 1993 to register just one domain.

I recently brokered a three letter .com for a client who hand registered it back in 1993.  My client was a longtime web guy who had an IT company and needed a domain at the time. He only registered that one domain. After the sale he told me the following story.

Circa summer 1993, a guy he knows at the time comes to his office and pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. On it are some of the best .coms possible.

Me.com
Porn.com
RealEstate.com
Business.com

About twenty domains in total in that general stratosphere. The guy asks my client for help in figuring out how to go about getting ownership of them. He thinks there is something there. Now keep in mind it’s 1993! Imagine the wide open pasture of virtually everything being available to be registered. My client could not believe this guy wanted him to go through all the trouble of filling out and mailing in forms to get the domains. They even got in an argument about it.  He did not see the value of spending the time to do it and it was free at the time! He convinced the guy it was a useless exercise that had no value. Unfortunately, the guy did not trust his gut and figured out a way. That’s not to say that even if he did register those domains in 1993 that he would have held them. Sometime in 1994,  it went from being free to register a .com domain to becoming $100 for 2 years. That drastic shift caused .com gold to fall from the sky. Of course my client who didn’t register the domains could just look back at what could have been.

Question: If you could take a time machine back to 1993 and register one free domain, what would it be?

 

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6 Replies to “Domain Time Machine”

  1. When I did have my first chance to register a domain in 1997, I tried to register mytwocents.com, but it was taken. Knowing what I know now, & going back to 1993, I’d register just my.com.

  2. I simply wonder that he was a web guy and didn’t think to hold at least one of them for future. Also this is first time i read that a .com name was free to register in the past.

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