How the New York Times website obtained its URL

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It is January. 22, 1996, In an article hidden on page D7The New York Times announced the public launch of its website.

“The New York Times begins to publish daily at the World Wide Web today, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the contents of the daily newspaper,” said the article, of Peter H. Lewis. “The electronic newspaper (address: http: /www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readers of the times.”

Mr. Lewis had once had that same URL.

In 1985, the editors of Times Am Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a working group, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in 2000. Mr. Lewis this week shared the details of the details of the details of the project and its times work in an email, from which much of this account is extracted.

Then, the editor of the Science and Columnist section of personal computers, Lewis, recalled to predict that for the millennium, Times's items would be read on personal computers screens, in cyberspace.

“I remember that Artie fired me with a wave,” Lewis wrote about Mr. Gelb.

Years later, editor Bill Stockton, whom Mr. Lewis said he defended science and technology reports, assigned Mr. Lewis to cover the “increase in the Internet.”

At some point, “I asked permission to register a web domain for the times, and they told me not,” Lewis wrote in email. “Several of us thought it was myopic.”

Another reporter, John Markoff, who had joined the Times to cover computer networks in 1988, had registered nyt.com Some time after starting your role. (He used it by email; he did not configure a web page in the domain, so people received an error alert when they tried to visit it). And Mr. Lewis collected nytimes.com around the end of 1993 or early 1994.

In mid -1995, Mr. Lewis received a call from Gordon Thompson, the Times Internet Services Manager, saying that the newspaper wanted to connect as “The New York Times in cyberspace” and needed the domain nytimes.com, which He had won in internal discussions about the shortest Nyt.com URL registered by Mr. Markoff. (According to Mr. Markoff's account, the Times thought that the three -letter URL would be confused with the New York Telephone Internet address).

In an email on Friday, Mr. Markoff said he had registered the Nyt.com domain before there were registration rates. But Mr. Lewis paid a $ 35 rate for nytimes.com. Lewis said he was happy to deliver the domain, as long as he was reimbursed. He transferred the property of the URL to The Times, which activated the website on January 19, 1996, from the hippodrome office building in Manhattan.

A few days later, the website was live to the world. Mr. Lewis did not participate in the launch, although he covered the event for the newspaper.

As Mr. Markoff wrote in 2017, Nyt.com finally delivered page.

But there is a problem: Mr. Lewis said he never received his reimbursement of $ 35.

We are working on that.