Yes, they were done by email and were a massive pain in the ass. There was a text file template you'd fill out and email it to ISI. The domains were free but y

Yes, they were done by email and were a massive pain in the ass. There was a text file template you'd fill out and email it to ISI. The domains were free but you had to have working nameservers for them and that was the tough part. As a young undergrad in 1993, I wanted to register a few but couldn't find anyone to serve DNS for me. The Vanderbilt IT staff was unwilling to help and I didn't know anybody else until I met my buddy Bob Collie (who owns bob.net). I ended up registering cjs.com, grateful.com, eleet.com and some others but let most of them expire when I couldn't afford the annual $70 per-domain fee that Network Solutions started charging after they took over from ISI. The only one I kept was bikeworld.com, which I had registered for my dad's bike shop. He still uses it today.