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On Jan. 22, 1996, in an article tucked away on Page D7, The New York Times announced the public launch of its website.
“The New York Times begins publishing daily on the World Wide Web today, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper’s contents,” stated the article, by Peter H. Lewis. “The electronic newspaper (address: http:/www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times.”
Mr. Lewis had once owned that very URL.
In 1985, the Times editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a task force, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in the Year 2000. Mr. Lewis this week shared the details of the project and his Times work in an email, from which much of this account is drawn.
Then an editor for the Science section and a personal computers columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that by the millennium, Times articles would be read on personal computer screens, in cyberspace.
“I recall Artie dismissing me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.
Years later, the editor Bill Stockton, who Mr. Lewis said championed science and technology reporting, assigned Mr. Lewis to cover the “rise of the internet.”
At some point, “I asked permission to register a web domain for The Times, and was told no,” Mr. Lewis wrote in the email. “Several of us thought that was shortsighted.”
Another reporter, John Markoff, who had joined The Times to cover computer networking in 1988, had registered nyt.com some time after starting his role. (He used it for email; he did not set up a web page at the domain, so people got an error alert when they tried to visit it.) And Mr. Lewis scooped up nytimes.com around late 1993 or early 1994.
In mid-1995, Mr. Lewis got a call from Gordon Thompson, The Times’s manager of internet services, saying the paper wanted to go online as “The New York Times in Cyberspace” and needed the nytimes.com domain, which had won out in internal discussions over the shorter nyt.com URL registered by Mr. Markoff. (Per Mr. Markoff’s account, The Times thought the three-letter URL would be confused with the internet address of New York Telephone.)
In an email on Friday, Mr. Markoff said that he had registered the nyt.com domain before there were registration fees. But Mr. Lewis paid a $35 fee for nytimes.com. Mr. Lewis said he was happy to hand the domain over — as long as he was reimbursed. He transferred ownership of the URL to The Times, which activated the website on Jan. 19, 1996, from the Hippodrome office building in Manhattan.
A few days later, the website was live to the world. Mr. Lewis was not involved in the launch, though he covered the event for the newspaper.
As Mr. Markoff wrote in 2017, he eventually handed over nyt.com, on the condition that he get to keep his email, [email protected], which he did until 2016. And today, both URLs send readers to The Times’s home page.
But there’s one problem: Mr. Lewis said he never received his $35 reimbursement.
We’re working on that.