Old Internet Files
rscott.org
rscott.org
REALMS.ORG
Admin: Diederich, Dana Dana.Diederich@GOLDINC.COM (601)374-6510 ...
I actually started the process of acquiring realms.org in 1994. At the time, you sent an e-mail to 'a guy' in DC. It took some time, but I finally got it registered in 1995. It was, of course, a free service.
I'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.
I would get contacted occasionally about selling domain names. I did take one company up on their offer for $10k. In retrospect, I do kinda regret selling that name. It was one of the rare six-character long .com domains.
My name is in there. People easily imagined these things and more, they're not hard to imagine.
ARPA (well, the ARPANET NIC at SRI) maintained a printed book of everyone (who wanted to be listed) on the ARPANET: name, phone number, mail address, physical address. The first one was about 1/2 an inch thick, the second one (around 1978 or 79?) about twice that...and then after that they gave up. I think I still have mine someplace.
(ARPA changed their name to DARPA at some point for reasons unknown to me)
https://emaillab.jp/dns/hosts/
and from 1985: https://emaillab.jp/pub/hosts/19850322/HOSTS.TXT
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'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.
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.
Some other TLDs gives access through Centralized Zone Data Service [2]. Some deny access, like ca.zone.
But I get what you mean, it was really publicly available.
[1] https://www.verisign.com/en_US/channel-resources/domain-regi...
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 / 90s (if they went searching)...
As a bookmarklet:
javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/save/'+location.href));
this site has a lot of examples: http://brutalistwebsites.com (HN is actually one of the examples listed)
That's how the web and HTML used to work: Focus almost entirely on content, semantic markup, the browser mostly decides how to present that information to you--along with your personal preferences.
So "brutalist" design does not apply, because there is no (visual) design involved.
Exactly. Just like brutalist architecture, an interior might expose a steel frame and the pipes, brutalist websites expose the HTML and base structure. Not all brutalist sites are completely stripped down this much but they have elements and expand on it.
Brutalist architecture was largely driven by enabling concrete technology. Concrete was previously used as a purely structural element, but as it advanced, architects realized it could be used as an aesthetic. IMHO, I believe that when these architects built these buildings, they were aiming for something more human, like shaped clay, but their efforts simply failed, and they created something entirely different. In fact, there was never any coherent brutalist architecture "movement", most brutalist buildings were deemed so long after they were built, largely because they appeared foreboding, intense, and used large quantities of concrete. (yes, there are plenty of "brutalist" buildings that don't heavily rely on concrete, but there's no question that many of the most famous buildings do so).
So I don't think brutalist architectural design necessarily means exposing the "base structure". I would not consider the pompidou center as brutalist.
Brutalist web design is also foreboding and intense, but that is really the end of their similarities. Many brutalist web designs intentionally create a disjointed feeling, overlapping text, mismatched fonts, large variations in color and font-size, are intentionally used to create a particular feeling of haphazardness and authenticity. I don't think brutalist architectural design carried that same intent.
Jesus.com was once owned by a guy who offered "Showers with Jesus" (he had long hair). ... or was it baths with Jesus. It was one of those.
http://utzoo.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/news100f1/b123/c...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.news.config/Zmx4...
https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~cwm/NetStuff/Old-Me-Postings/com...
looks like TIAC (The Internet Access Company), an old ISP. Wow, I haven't seen a reference to Erol's in forever...
If only I had kept that.