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Comment by smhenderson | Hacker News Reader

Seeing "domain-contacts.txt" reminded how much simpler the internet used to be. Imagine not being afraid of giving out your contact info to the whole internet!

I'm not sure if the people who participated at the time would ever have imagined the need for whois anonymizers and weird tricks to keep your email address from being picked up by robots and spiders.

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A lot of registrars get away with selling WHOIS privacy packages, but now thanks to the GDPR, most personally identifying whois data is private by default.

I would get contacted occasionally about selling domain names. I did take one company up on their offer for $10k. In retrospect, I do kinda regret selling that name. It was one of the rare six-character long .com domains.

I'm now imagining what someone from those days would make of your post about their contact info being picked up by "robots and spiders." :D

Web Spiders have been around since ‘94 and the spider terminology for mapping networks is even older so they’d likely get it.

Oh geez. Webcrawler, and robots.txt. There was no SEO, just "don't overwhelm my modem / ISDN connection / T1". It's been a while!

A lot more interesting protocols too! I miss gopher & finger

if the people who participated at the time would ever have imagined the need for whois anonymizers and weird tricks to keep your email address from being picked up by robots and spiders.

My name is in there. People easily imagined these things and more, they're not hard to imagine.

> Seeing "domain-contacts.txt" reminded how much simpler the internet used to be. Imagine not being afraid of giving out your contact info to the whole internet!

ARPA (well, the ARPANET NIC at SRI) maintained a printed book of everyone (who wanted to be listed) on the ARPANET: name, phone number, mail address, physical address. The first one was about 1/2 an inch thick, the second one (around 1978 or 79?) about twice that...and then after that they gave up. I think I still have mine someplace.

(ARPA changed their name to DARPA at some point for reasons unknown to me)

Regarding why DARPA changed their name, it was because of a change in focus. Originally they were much broader and were also involved with early projects related to space and nuclear test monitoring, among others. Around 1970 ARPA was consolidated and these responsibilities were transferred to other agencies (NASA and NNSA in the cases that I mentioned), with ARPA then focusing mostly on defence related research and becoming DARPA.

here's a copy of HOSTS.TXT from 1982 and 1983:

https://emaillab.jp/dns/hosts/

and from 1985: https://emaillab.jp/pub/hosts/19850322/HOSTS.TXT

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