Times Insider explains who we’re and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes collectively.
On Jan. 22, 1996, in an article tucked away on Page D7, The New York Occasions introduced the general public launch of its web site.
“The New York Occasions begins publishing each day on the World Broad Net right now, providing readers all over the world instant entry to a lot of the each day newspaper’s contents,” said the article, by Peter H. Lewis. “The digital newspaper (deal with: http:/www.nytimes.com) is a part of a technique to increase the readership of The Occasions.”
Mr. Lewis had as soon as owned that very URL.
In 1985, the Occasions editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a job drive, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a venture known as The New York Occasions within the Yr 2000. Mr. Lewis this week shared the main points of the venture and his Occasions work in an e mail, from which a lot of this account is drawn.
Then an editor for the Science part and a private computer systems columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that by the millennium, Occasions articles could be learn on private laptop screens, in our on-line world.
“I recall Artie dismissing me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.
Years later, the editor Invoice Stockton, who Mr. Lewis mentioned championed science and know-how reporting, assigned Mr. Lewis to cowl the “rise of the web.”
Sooner or later, “I requested permission to register an online area for The Occasions, and was advised no,” Mr. Lewis wrote within the e mail. “A number of of us thought that was shortsighted.”
One other reporter, John Markoff, who had joined The Occasions to cowl laptop networking in 1988, had registered nyt.com a while after beginning his function. (He used it for e mail; he didn’t arrange an online web page on the area, so folks received an error alert after they tried to go to it.) And Mr. Lewis scooped up nytimes.com round late 1993 or early 1994.
In mid-1995, Mr. Lewis received a name from Gordon Thompson, The Occasions’s supervisor of web companies, saying the paper needed to go surfing as “The New York Occasions in Our on-line world” and wanted the nytimes.com area, which had received out in inside discussions over the shorter nyt.com URL registered by Mr. Markoff. (Per Mr. Markoff’s account, The Occasions thought the three-letter URL could be confused with the web deal with of New York Phone.)
In an e mail on Friday, Mr. Markoff mentioned that he had registered the nyt.com area earlier than there have been registration charges. However Mr. Lewis paid a $35 payment for nytimes.com. Mr. Lewis mentioned he was joyful at hand the area over — so long as he was reimbursed. He transferred possession of the URL to The Occasions, which activated the website on Jan. 19, 1996, from the Hippodrome office building in Manhattan.
A number of days later, the web site was stay to the world. Mr. Lewis was not concerned within the launch, although he coated the occasion for the newspaper.
As Mr. Markoff wrote in 2017, he eventually handed over nyt.com, on the situation that he get to maintain his e mail, markoff@nyt.com, which he did till 2016. And right now, each URLs ship readers to The Occasions’s house web page.
However there’s one downside: Mr. Lewis mentioned he by no means acquired his $35 reimbursement.
We’re engaged on that.
