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Comment by R_Edward | Hacker News Reader

"Domain names have been actually been available for 28 years – yes, before you even knew what a computer looked like."

Guess I'm not part of domainholdings's target audience. I've been programming computers for 33 years. So no, not before I even knew what a computer looked like.

But man, how much money would I have, had I snapped up as many www.<fortune500companyname>.com domains as I could, and sold them to the companies as they became internet-aware!

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You probably would have made zero money as the companies would have filed a trademark / wipo dispute and taken the domains.

I would have registered a bunch of generic domains, like business.com or sex.com (lookup the history of that domain for an interesting read.)

A lot of people did exactly this!

Unless your last name is nissan: http://www.nissan.com

I was thinking about this too, and I'm guessing that dumb 20 year old me would have sold those domains in the late 90's for thousands thinking I was making a huge profit instead of waiting a few more years until those Coca Cola people got desperate.

I get continually reminded of this when people see that I registered play.org as late as mid-1994. It was still free, and a substantial number of English words were still available. I'm often reminded by others that I could have also registered play.com or other common words.

Of course, much of the culture back then was: I only need one domain. This one was for my personal site, so obviously, it shouldn't be .com domain...

No regrets, though: I wouldn't want to be the type of person that looks for "under-utilized resources" to exploit. There are far more interesting things in life than that for me.

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