I remember visiting my sister in New Paltz when my brother in law brought out his IBM laptop from work.  He was showing off the IBM.com website viewed through the Internet browser at the time: Mosaic.  What fun, I was hooked and had to have it.  I remember being in school and utilizing the www, ftp, and gopher commands from the CLI on our mainframe.  Waves of scrolling amber text!! Not so nice. Sort of like trying to read the credits after a movie, ok.

I called my school, Stony Brook U, and they told me about interamp.  A GUI client that would allow me to utilize all the Internet based protocols in Windows!! IT was buggy, but it worked!  The wave of the future was upon me and I didn’t even flinch.  Too excited about going online and chatting, sending messages,  browsing and seeing what my other geek friends were using to get online.  So there was interramp, netcom, then came CompuServe and AOL and Netscape. I used WebCrawler all the time until……!! So, by that time, all the great domain names were still available and it would have taken just a small effort and 75 dollars per to reserve a few domains names through the INTERNIC  to be living large today.

Just a few years later, most of the good domain names were taken, in particular, christmasgifts.com.  The owner’s sister purchased it in the mid 90’s and because of such a great name, they live off the advertising with very little marketing.  What a great find.  The rest of the folks who didn’t ever develop their domains, but just kept them as investments, are now cashing in and earning a nice living.