Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and we deliver behind the scenes about how our journalism is found.
On January 22, 1996, in an article that fell on the D7 page, the New York Times announced the public launch of its website.
“The New York Times begins to publish daily on the World Wide Web today, offering readers around the world direct access to most of the content of the daily newspaper,” the article said, from Peter H. Lewis. “The online newspaper (address: http: /www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy for expanding the reader of the time.”
Mr Lewis once had the property of this URL.
In 1985, publishers 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 his details Project and HIS Times work on an e -mail, from which much of this account has been designed.
Subsequently, an author of the department of science and a personal computers columnist, Mr Lewis recalled that predicting that from the millennium, the Times will be read on cyberspace on personal computer screens.
“I remember Artie rejected me with a wave,” Mr Lewis wrote about Mr Gelb.
Years later, author Bill Stockton, who Mr Lewis said he was promoting science and technological reference, commissioned Mr Lewis to cover the “rise in the internet”.
At some point, “I asked for permission to record a web field for the Times and they told me no,” Mr Lewis writes in the email. “Many of us thought it was short -sighted.”
Another journalist, John Markoff, who had joined the Times to cover computer networking in 1988, had recorded nyt.com at some point after his role began. (He used it for the email, did not create a website in the field, so people received an error notice when they tried to visit it.) And Mr Lewis threw nytimes.com around the end of 1993 or early 1994.
In mid -1995, Mr. Lewis received a call from Gordon Thompson, director of Internet Times, saying the paper wanted to go to the internet as “The New York Times in cyberspace” and needed Nytimes.com, Nytimes.com, who had won the internal discussions about the shortest url nyt.com recorded by Mr Markoff. (According to Mr Markoff’s account, the Times believed that the three -letter URL would be confused with the New York Internet address.)
In an email on Friday, Mr Markoff said he had recorded the NYT.COM before registering the registration fees. But Mr. Lewis paid a $ 35 fee for nytimes.com. Mr Lewis said he was happy to deliver the field – as long as he returned. He transferred the ownership 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 site was alive in the world. Mr Lewis did not participate in the launch, though he covered the newspaper event.
As Mr Markoff wrote in 2017, he finally delivered nyt.com, provided he holds his email, Markoff@nyt.com, which made until 2016.
But there is one problem: Mr. Lewis said he never received the $ 35 return.
We are working on it.
