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On January 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 today begins publishing daily on the World Wide Web, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper's content,” the article stated, by Peter H. Lewis. “The electronic newspaper (address: http: /www.CBNewz) is part of a strategy to expand the readership of the time.”
Mr. Lewis once owned that very URL.
In 1985, Times editors Am Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb assembled a Task Force, including Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called the New York Times in the Year 2000. Mr. Lewis this week shared details of the project and his Times work in an email, from which much of this account was drawn.
Then a science section editor and a personal computers columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that Times articles would be read in cyberspace in cyberspace in cyberspace.
“I remember Artie rejecting me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.
Years later, editor Bill Stockton, who Mr. Lewis said was a proponent of science and technology reporting, assigned Mr. Lewis to cover the “rise of the Internet.”
At one point, “I asked permission to register a Web domain for the Times, and was told no,” Mr. Lewis wrote in the email. “A lot of us thought that was short-sighted.”
Another reporter, John Markoff, who had joined the Times in 1988 to cover computer networks, had registered NYT.com some time after he started his role. (He used it for e-mail; he didn't set up a web page at the domain, so people got an error message when they tried to visit it.) And Mr. Lewis picked up Nytimes.com around late 1993 or early 1994.
In mid-1995, Mr. Lewis received a call from Gordon Thompson, the Times's Manager of Internet Services, saying the newspaper wanted to go online as “The New York Times in Cyberspace” and needed the Nytimes.com domain, which had won In internal discussions about 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's telephone.)
In an email on Friday, Mr. Markoff said he registered the NYT.com domain before there were registration fees. But Mr. Lewis paid a $35 fee for CBNewz. Mr Lewis said he was happy to hand over the domain – as long as he was compensated. He transferred 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 website was live to the world. Mr Lewis was not involved in the launch, although he had covered the event for the newspaper.
As Mr. Markoff wrote in 2017, he eventually handed over NYT.com, on the condition that he can 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 fee.
We are working on that.
