The International Order of Seth

On a hot summer afternoon in August of 1996, I was sitting at my desk thinking that I’m a technology guy, so why not pick up a personal domain name? This was the golden age of domain name registration. Domains were getting swooped up super quickly, and sold for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars if you had a good one. Domain squatting was just becoming a thing, so I felt a little pressure to grab one quickly for myself. I looked up Seth.com but sadly it was taken. My second choice, Seth.org, was available so I began the process to register it.

Back in 1996, domains cost $70 bucks a piece and all your money went to some faceless organization called the InterNIC. They were the defacto domain name registration authority. The InterNIC ran like a government agency and they actually cared if you were a registered company in order to get a .com domain, or if you were an actual non-profit or other formal organization in order to register a .org domain. This was an issue because I wasn’t a non-profit, nor was there an organization rallied around the name Seth.org. I just really liked it, so they forced my hand and I quickly had to come up with a name for my new organization. Thus, “The International Order of Seth” was born.

Keep in mind there was no GoDaddy or Google back then. Buying a domain name was difficult, hosting it was even trickier. A friend of my dad’s, and then eventually a friend of my own were my first hosting providers. I ran a small vanity website who’s only purpose was to share stuff about me and some of the stuff I was doing. Fast forward to 1998 and I picked up my first digital camera, the state-of-the-art 1.6 megapixel Kodak DC260. In so many ways, this camera changed my like and pushed me further into working with the web and solidifying my purpose for the next 20 years as a computer technologist. Seth.org became a place where I’d showcase pictures for house parties I’d thrown and events I’d attended. Eventually I would show off some of the personal projects I was working on, some of the professional work I’d done, and I used Seth.org as a recruiting site to get me more work.

You may be asking yourself, “what ever happened to The International Order of Seth?”

Over the years I would occasionally get an email or DM (or “instant message” as they were called back when AIM was a thing) from some other Seth in some other remote part of the world, asking if they could join the IoS. That was a flattering request each time it happened, and it still is, although it happens much less frequently now. I would happily add an email address for my fellow Seth and I’ve had some interesting conversations with Seths around the world as a result. I suppose, in a way, that Seth.org really did become that organization I told the InterNIC I was back in 1996. I’d like to think that the International Order of Seth has helped many Seths throughout the world to connect and share their experiences being Seth.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through owning this domain, it’s that no two Seth’s are even remotely the same, except that not a single Seth has more than two other friends with the name Seth, and that makes me smile every time I think about it.

If you want to see what Seth.org looked like back in 1996 and beyojnd, check out the WayBackMachine here. Shockingly, some of the links still work even!