Fun story. And a bit 'o nostalgia here: Back in 1995 (or so), IIRC, InterNIC basically required that you have a contact email address and a DNS server to host

Fun story. And a bit 'o nostalgia here: Back in 1995 (or so), IIRC, InterNIC basically required that you have a contact email address and a DNS server to host the domain. The latter wasn't terribly easy to come by, so it wasn't as easy as today to register names. A friend of mine, however, had another friend at an ISP, which gave him (relatively) easy access to a simple DNS server. So, seeing the same sort of opportunity as I imagine many did, he went kind of nuts. He was into fashion at the time, so for at least a short period of time he bought and owned versace.com, calvinklein.com, donnakaran.com, and armani.com. Not a bad batch of names to own, eh? I think he (somewhat scummily) sold at least one of the names back to the rightful owner, and had to give up the rest when the lawyers got involved. But for a while, he had some fun and had some cool email addresses ;)