Never forget that Apple big-footed an individual to take away newton.com from him. IIRC, "Mark Newton" (edit: ?, from memory) had the domain and Apple took it. Can't find a reference to the story now.
Good (and sobering) to also remember the dark side that seems to go along with much (or is it all?) of human achievement.
The sad/interesting part is, that some of those dark moments seem so unnecessary - at least in hindsight. But I suspect that the underlying psychology of ruthlessness may be a requirement for much (all?) larger achievements.
I'm torn on this one, because at some point "first-come, first-served" is not a great thing in the realm of non-fungible domain names. I can't find much information on this subject, but what did Apple do?
This is really strange: I thought maybe I could use the wayback machine to look at the old site, but it only goes back to Nov 1998, where it has Apple content on it. Doing various searches I can't find a trace of the story. I searched the history on slashdot, which is probably where I heard about it, but no reference. Maybe it was Usenet...
But I can't find any references to it anywhere.
Much of the outrage at the time was: Hey, Apple, you already have Apple.com, why aren't you using apple.com/newton ? The owner of newton.com seemed to have as much right as Apple did to use the domain (it seemed to be his legal last name), and IIRC he had it for years before Apple released the Newton.
A bulk of the remaining animosity at the time was HOW Apple went after it. They didn't offer to buy it or negotiate with the guy that had it. Instead they went with: "This is ours now." through ICANN or whatever it was at the time.
Very similar to the nissan.com situation, except, you know, the individual still has nissan.com.
This was probably around the time that an article came out about domain squatting, which ended with: Does this mean that I could just go out and register mcdonalds.com ? E-mail me with your thoughts at: ronald@mcdonalds.com :-)
