How Did Anthony Eden Pass a Seven-day Domain Registrar Test in 1999 and Become One of the First Seven Sellers of Dot Com Names?

Anthony Eden passed the technical accreditation test to become a domain registrar in seven days in 1999, during deregulation of the dot com namespace, and became part of one of the first seven registrars accredited to sell dot com names.

Network Solutions had managed the entirety of the dot com namespace until deregulation in 1999. Eden was in France, planning to come back stateside and looking for work, when someone who had already finished the administrative part gave him seven days to accomplish the technical parts of becoming a domain registrar. Writing in Java, he built a Swing-based Java interface that ran Jython, a version of Python that runs in Java, with a text editor inside the interface, rather than running Jython or Python from the command line. They passed the accreditation. The next couple of months were madness in how quickly they grew, and the next big event was the dot com bubble burst.

Once the accreditation was done, Eden built a full web app, a JSP-based web app, so the registrar could handle orders and registration and create a domain name on the internet.