I was on the web before the New York Times was, me and Cuda Brown at Meanderings

Megan DeTrolio tells the story about how The New York Times got its domain name, and from one of its own reporters.

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.”

And so it goes. There's more at that link.

Back in 1994 I met Cuda Brown, not his real name BTW, in the African-American Forum on Compuserve. We hit it off. Cuda had been sending out an email to friends and family for several months. He called it "Meandings." He was thinking of putting it on the web. He asked me to join him. I forget just exactly when we went live, but here's Meanderings, archived in the WayBack Machine. And here I am, listed in Meanderings 1.06 for October 1994. That must have been when we live on the web. And here's Meanderings 2.05, where we partnered with Vibe Magazine to publish essays about O. J. Simpson. Those were the days!

By then we'd launched Gravity, with Meanderings as one of Gravity's offerings. Why "Gravity"? I think the idea was that we'd be a persistent Black Hole in Cyberspace. There you can see our tribute to Martin Luther King. I could go on and on about that. Maybe later.

Anyhow, we didn't last much longer than that. I forget why we folded. Probably because Cuda had to go back to working for a living. He'd taken time off work, as an investment banker in the utilities practice of Shearson Lehman (remember them?), to launch Meanderings from a server in his house. Whatever. By then Salon had come on line and I camped out in their Table Talk discussion forum, where I lingered 'till the bitter end in 2011. I forget what happened to Bill, Cuda's real name. But we kept in touch.

Those were the days.