The tech boom in the late ‘90’s was a gold rush for Internet entrepreneurs. Big ideas came with big IPO’s and simple pitches brought in big investment. We were curious. Where was our own WARSTUFF in all of this, was it part of the gold rush?
WARSTUFF Then and Now 1999-2011We decided to find out, and thanks to online resource the Wayback Machine, we soon found our answer. The Wayback machine service allows you to browse through an archive of over 150 billion web pages from 1996 to a few months ago.
Sure enough, WARSTUFF was archived to April, 1999 – the height of the tech boom. It was then owned by ‘Mid-States Coin & Militaria’, a small business based in Tulsa Oklahoma. But in 2000, the site ownership passed to an internet company in Singapore, Internet Werks, and a domain for sale holding page went up. The page could no longer be indexed by the Wayback Machine from then. That is until we acquired it in late 2009 through a brokerage.
So who were ‘Mid-States Coin & Militaria’, and were they still around? The archive shows WARSTUFF was serving as a simple site acting as a brochure for a small business that sold, er… coins and militaria. Hardly a dotcom success, but the premise of WARSTUFF as a specialist marketplace was there at the height of the boom. The site was someone’s big idea. We decided to see if we could get in touch with the previous owners and find out what their big idea was and how close it was to the brand we launched when we acquired the domain.
Based at 2501, East 51st Street, Tulsa, we found plenty of business directory listings relating to Mid-States Coin & Militaria, but the contact numbers listed all proved to be disconnected, and there was no trace of a business website. Google Streetview didn’t help either. The view of the address shows a number of commercial units on the edge of a road, but none give clues as to whether Mid-States Coin & Militaria still exists.
So perhaps we will never find out whether the WARSTUFF brand we have built in the last few years is close to what those previous owners at Mid-States Coin & Militaria envisioned during the gold rush years of the late 1990’s. The dotcom boom is a distant memory and the glitz that came with it is long gone. But at least after 15 years we’d like to think we’re doing justice and giving life to what is, in the history of the Internet, an old domain name.