Article 51023 of best.general:
Path: news3.best.com!nntp1.ba.best.com!not-for-mail
Newsgroups: best.general
Subject: Re: Domain searches
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Organization: a user of Best Internet Communications, Inc.  www.best.com
From: hardie@best.com (Ted Hardie)
Date: 14 Mar 2000 17:34:32 GMT
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In article <38cdb1c4$0$221@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> wrote:
>And you seemed to have missed the point of my comment "telenet to sri-nic and
>run whois".  Note that "sri-nic" was the COMPLETE address -- this predates any
>*.com, *.net, etc.   Back then the NIC was running on either a DECsystem-20
>with TOPS-20, or on Tenex with a modified PDP-10 (I really forget which, it's
>been almost 30 years now (since early/mid 1970s)).

The SRI-NIC machine was a DEC 2065 running TOPS-20.  I worked at SRI in
the Network Information Systems Center (which ran the SRI-NIC and
DDN NIC) around that time and I became very impressed with TOPS-20.  
I still consider it to have had one of the best low-level archiving systems
ever.  

If you are nostalgic to telnet in and use a whois server try connecting
via telnet to port 43 of whois.networksolutions.com and using some of
the old whois flags.  dump do(main) domain.tld will still show the old
database entries, including the references to tacs and tips.
>
>The "old" 'Net was kinda small; I used to correspond with Richard Stallman
>whose email address was "rms@mit-ai" and some of my email addresses back then
>were:
>
>    sri-kl!thadlabs!thad
>    thad@sri-kl
>    {decwrl,mips,fernwood}!btr!thad
>
>Heck, I still have some of the old UUCP maps in which every addressable
>computer was listed; they're not that large.  I even still have an email
>that was sent to me from the Kremlin circa 1985 one day after the Moscow-
>San Francisco Transport opened; the path (IIRC) was kremvax, then some site
>in Finland, then SRI (in Menlo Park,CA), then my home computer -- the guy was
>thanking me for something I posted about crypt in a net.micro newsgroup (IIRC).
>
>In any event, the original (circa 1970s and 1980s) "whois" had a complete
>command front end (with command completion and extensive help) in which
>searches like Malcolm requested were easy to do.
>
>Thad