Back up to 1994... We were supposed to be developing for x-windows. WTF... NCSA Mosaic browser... We're on it. Two months later you could query our Sybase database via an HTML form. Another 3 weeks, you could query our Oracle database with a different form. A year or so later you could download a package to do database interfaces. Soon you could buy one.

Soon after, we used to print the entire catalog of registered domain names, just to see what was taken.