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Comment by amichal | Hacker News Reader

Around this time the method to get a DNS name was basically the same. Send an email with some reasoning to the right person and the name was yours. I remember being amazed that was the case. I also got a SSL cert issued around 1995-6 and the process then was email followed by faxing (or paper mail) proof (in the form of bank account, DUNS numbers and state-level incorporation records) documentation confirming you were who you say you were. I dont believe money even changed hands then.

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I vividly recall getting a visit (around '96) from Mark Shuttleworth (of Canonical fame). He had founded Thawte Consulting, I think the first competitor of Verisign, who were the only company that sold SSL certificates at the time. He was traveling Europe to visit ISPs trying to woo them into using his service for SSL certificates. He had to spend some time explaining what certificates actually are, because I only had a vague idea (I founded one of the first ISPs in the Netherlands but nobody used SSL at the time). He was much cheaper than Verisign, by automating the process on his site so it was an easy sell.

Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t know Mark Shuttleworth founded Thawte. I always knew him as the Ubuntu guy, but never knew where he earned his millions.

> Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting in 1995, a currently running company which specialized in digital certificates and Internet security. In December 1999, Thawte was acquired by VeriSign, earning Shuttleworth R3.5 billion (about US$575 (equivalent to $844.70 in 2017) million).

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

I worked quite a bit with SSL certificates in the 90s. They were expensive back then, there were only a few CAs to choose from. Then Thawte entered the market and was cheaper than the rest. I think they were $200.

Maybe DNS was free and SSL cost something? The $200 figure is ringing bells. All I remember was the faxing and trying to explain to the CEO we need to send copies of incorporation documents to a random company no one had heard of.

I seem to remember domain registration costing $200 from the sole registrar, Network Solutions.

I remember it being $70 per domain for two years (from NetSol), but I don't remember when -- I'll go with "sometime around '95, plus or minus five years or so".

Got my first domain in 1996, and it was indeed $70 from netsol. I had many ideas to pursue and wanted to domain them all, but it was too costly, so I limited to just a couple up back then.

If you go back far enough, domains were an email away or at most a one time fee. I had one back that long ago, and remembered paying something for it, but that was because I didn’t have my own server. This was for a uucp/email gateway, so I needed someone with a server to batch up the email for me to download.

This was in the 93-94 range.

+1, never realized Mark S. Was the founder of Thawte! I co-founded one of the first ISPs in Brazil back in 94-95, so we used VeriSign for SSL certificates and had to put up with their high prices ($500 or so), plus the hassle of having company's certification of incorporation officially translated into English (rinse and repeat for every of our corporate hosting customers).

Thawte came soon after, but IIRC their root keys weren't included in the first few Netscape releases (or was it the first IE?), so it generated a warning when accessing the site. We had to keep paying overpriced VeriSign certs for a few more years, until Thawte became widely accepted.

afaik (going back to the late 80's) DNS registration was never free. $25/yr, something like that. I know this because a startup I founded registered the name "talk.com" but subsequently lost it because the person who made the registration didn't want to spend the $25..

Depends on the domain. .us registrations were done by emailing a filled-out template to a hostmaster.

I worked at an isp that was the state registrar. I had number.street.city.state.us

I should have maintained that.

> I dont believe money even changed hands then.

Do you know which CA this was? Maybe you got in during some kind of test or audit period, before the CA had begun its regular business operations?

I dont know for certain. I'm almost certain it was Verisign. They might not have been using that name yet. There was a bunch of phoning around to see how this was even done. Asking Wikipedia isn't helping me much just confirms that all this was new back then. I also didn't handle the money for us so it's possible we where invoiced or someone sent a check that I didn't know about. I dont even remember why we felt we needed it at the time.

I'm sure it must have started off with a period of time where things were pretty informal and touch-and-go!

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