Conceptualist.com, By Sahar Sarid

The following is a comment by Chris Hartnett in an earlier post, worth its weight in gold hence posted here in a post rather than a comment.
Enjoy!
Sahar

Sahar,

Thanks for the very kind words.

I am getting old but not quite that old yet. I was far from the first Domainer and I’m really embarrassed I didn’t fully “get”? what was going on until after many years of first hearing about and using what we then called the ARPANET in 1985. My memory is mixed with a great deal of Telecom data because that was really our main business back in 1992 when I found out about domain names but my earliest memory of the “internet”? was probably back in 1985.

There was a genius by the name of Jacques Voorhees who started “The Polygon Network”? in 1984 and for $200 a month he sent you an IBM clone computer in a box with a modem etc” and we would connect and there were about 200 jewelers and gem dealers using this network which is now the largest wholesale jewelry network in the world. There wasn’t email as such for us but when you logged on, you would get your messages from others in the network. It was a closed network and we only talked to each other but I remember I was number 261 to join our network and that was my ID number for many years to come. We stayed on this network for years and I met many great friends who are still good friends today and one who I recently got into domains.

Poylgon only had an I.P. addresses back then and we never used or even heard about domain names until much later although they were just starting then ( about 1985 I think) but it was out of our line of focus at the time, which was jewelry and gemstones.

I remember a post on Polygon once where a guy told Jacques Voorhees that someone had just register his name, Polygon.com and that was back in 1992 because Global Link was just starting out in Iowa at the time and I was doing that during the day and selling gemstones by night on Polygon. That was probably the first time I had ever heard about a domain name although we were using the “world wide web”? at the time every day. It was all dial up and we had many different names for it but I just called it Polygon because that was our Network. I remember some called it NSF back in 1986-1987. I remember this because it would remind me of the NSF returned check stamp at the bank for NOT SUFFICIENT FUNDS. Later it was called Interop or something like that.

Jacques didn’t think anything of the fact that someone had registered his name back then since no one really cared about domain names and he didn’t even register his own domain name until 1995 and that was Polygon.net. A full 11 years after he had started his Network on the internet. By late 1993 our Network Operation Center (NOC) at Global Link already had started getting domain names that had to do with our Telecom business and everyone in our world liked the DOT NET names best back then because we were building telecom networks around the world and the network was king and music to everyone’s ears. DOT COM? No way. DOT NET was the KING of the InterNET and heck, my name was HartNETT so what do you think I was registering? Ah youth, we live and learn.

After all, I had been on The Polygon Network for 7 years already and we knew Networks worked and we had just started to think about everyone doing commerce on the internet although because of Jacques foresight, we had been doing electronic jewelry commerce all along since 1985. He had started Polygon in 1984 but I didn’t get my IBM clone from him and get on until 1985. I was a little late to the Polygon party. There were 260 people ahead of me already and I actually felt like I was behind the curve. I had two computers back then on my desk in my home office in the attic. One Mac and this old clunker grey IBM clone I had gotten many years earlier from Jacques. That is what we called them. Clones. Years later they became PC’s.

I remember in 1993 hearing that Al Gore and Bill Clinton were online and that is when I really started getting serious about making money with the internet. I didn’t know what was going to happen, I just knew with every cell in my body that the “WWW”? was going to be big. We started to pitch the Internet and our GOL (Global Online) ideas to our investment bankers and anyone who would listen. We weren’t pitching DOMAINS we were selling the INTERNET itself which still got great resistance from Wall Street. I remember pitching JP Morgan on the Internet in New York and they told me, after two hours of a great vision quest, they told me to stick to Telecom. Around this time, late 1993 and 1994 we started getting more and more names from InterNIC. I was trying to buy LINK.com from a guy who had registered the name back in 1989 while he was working for AT&T. I offered him $5K and everyone in the office thought I was drunk. Our company name at first was USA LINK before it was USA GLOBAL LINK and then later we had GLOBAL LINK and GLOBAL ONLINE. I bought Global Link for $25k a week after someone else registered it, used it for years and then sold it to State Street Financial in Boston in 2000 for $375K when I sold my Telephone Company. I paid $50K for GlobalOnline.com back then and still have it today and wouldn’t sell it for $500K.

Anyway, I will get depressed if I start thinking about the names I missed, dropped or sold. C.com, Chris.com, and WORLD.com were other one’s we just missed by hours or days. And even GLOBAL.com went registered right out from under me but that is a whole even longer story we might post here someday but not now. I sold GOL long before I should have to our ISP in Japan because the guy was a friend and my telecom rep there. I later offered him $350K and he wouldn’t sell it after AOL caught on. He was later killed in LA on a business trip from Japan and they never found out why he was killed. He was an American living in Japan and his Japanese wife later sold the company and the domain. I was running a phone business at the time and this was just a hobby along with Global 800 numbers and so I missed a lot of names and let a bunch we registered just drop. Let’s not go there. I’ll really feel stupid then. At least this is my story and I’m sticking to it.

I do remember back in late 1994 I finally really got serious about buying names. I had my wife and my three daughters at home and in the office all the time with me and we would start to write down names with the word GLOBAL before it. Over the next 4 years we registered almost every word in the English language with the word GLOBAL before it. Every one thought we were absolutely crazy. And by then, it was no longer free and this was a very expensive hobby. When we register the most names it cost between $35 and as much as $200 per name for a two year registration which you had to do in those days because that was the rule.

I remember that by 1995 I had an IBM, a AOL, a CompuServe and a Prodigy ISP accounts. I was hooked on domains but we still didn’t know what to buy. I remember buying GP.net very late in the game and I could have had just about any two letter domain I wanted at the time. Even my own initials. I keep GP.net till this day just to remind me. I owned GP.com and we sold it to Georgia Pacific but ready for this, we sold it for $2500, and I actually liked GP.net better because I wanted to have a thing called a Global Post Office as our email network for Global Online and GP.net was going to be our email address for the network. After all, at the time IBM.net was the biggest international service provider and they didn’t use IBM.com for their network. Why would you? DOT NET was where it was at if you wanted a network. DOT COM was just for wimps and Universities. I bought Global.net before I even thought of getting Global.com and then let it drop because by then, no one wanted DOT NET’s anymore and everyone was grabbing up DOT COM’s. ATT bought the IBM.net Global Network and they stopped using IBM.net. A great domain and great email address. Email should be two letters. Period. It was so easy. I was Chris@IBM.net. I cried when they dropped it and they told me I had to use CHartnett@ATTGlobal.net instead. What were they thinking?

It was all right there before our noses but who knew for sure what the future would bring and it kept on changing? Who knows what is next even now? You place your bets and pay the man his money and all you can do is sit back and wait and see.

DOT TV anyone?

Thanks Sahar and sorry for the long post. You got me going down memory lane and I couldn’t stop. They were fun and exciting times and so is today.

All the very best and Happy Holiday’s and I hope 2008 finds you to be the Number 1 Blogger on the “ARPANET”? or as you younger kids call it today, the BANK. I remember back when we had to work to make that kind of money.

Chris