I’m sure by now we’re all aware of the resurgence of the third-to-last letter of the alphabet on the Internet lately, as one of the world’s richest man acquired a popular social platform and turned it into… uh… something. He owned the x.com domain for several years and decided to put it into use, pointing it to the site he now owns.
Although, funny enough, it is not the first time I heard of that domain name. In fact, I actually had memories of discovering the site decades ago, and just browsing its content to see what it had.
Back in the late 1990s, when exploring the early Internet on dial-up, it wasn’t uncommon to just type in random words that would come into mind into the location bar of the browser and wait to see what you were gonna get. One day, I ended up on x.com. All I could find of value was a collection of sound files from The Simpsons and a few other popular animated shows. It wasn’t much, but to a high school student like me in those days with lots of time to waste, it was hours of fun. Or at least, minutes. Actually, it would take a minute or two only to load some WAV file of a couple of seconds.
The x.com domain is one of the few one-letter domains ever registered, along with i.net, q.com, q.net, x.org, and z.com. The domain name was registered on 2 April 1993 by a little-known organization by the name of Weinstein & DePaolis. Not much is known of it besides the names of the people said to make the site “possible”: Dave Weinstein, Marcel DePaolis, and Suzanne DePaolis.
In December 1993, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the organization in charge of the rules for domain names and distributing IP addresses, decided a minimum of two letters were required thereafter, making new single-character domains impossible.
The site said to be “not nearly the worst place on the web” turned out to be the personal homepage of Rob Walker, an engineer who worked on an Internet-suite and browser called Emissary, then worked at Netscape. Today, he works for Apple. In fact, for a brief moment in 1997, the site pointed to another with more details about himself at rwalker.com, now defunct yet still registered.
However, x.com was sometimes labelled “Dave’s World,” undoubtedly a reference to Dave Weinstein, making me wonder if there was a struggle of power over the site. ;) More likely, the appearance of rwalker.com was only a configuration mistake and Rob simply decided to his stuff over to his own domain.
Elon Musk bought the domain in 1999 to start an online bank, which then merged with the software company Confinity to become PayPal. Later in 2017, the aforementioned billionaire bought back the domain name from the merged company for an undisclosed amount and let the domain sit there with a web page only displaying a typewriter-style letter x. In July this year, after his earlier purchase of Twitter, he decided to axe the brand and replace it with X, now pointing x.com to the social platform.
Elon actually went out of his way to buy the domain twice. He must really like it! I wonder what would Rob say about x.com today…
Screenshots for this article were taken using Copy’s Windows 98 emulator and the Protoweb proxy. Of course, the original site was not served on port 1995. ;)