What was registration fees back then? Why wouldn't people just squat on a bunch of two/three letter domains? Was it prohibitively difficult to register..
You're looking at it with hindsight; at the time very few people had even heard of domain names, let alone why they should register a domain name, or that they would - eventually - be worth some money.
I'm fairly sure if you extended the list to idk, 1000 or 10.000 you'd see all two/three letter domains being taken. Same with e.g. Twitter accounts. You might still have a chance with your local Slack team though.
There was a massive wave of domain-squatting round about 2000 in the dotcom boom, and as a result "trademark reform" was enacted to allow brands to confiscate their named domains from domain squatters.
Also, quite a lot of domains had specific requirements. You either had to be in the country, or a specific kind of business, or know the sysadmin running the registry personally.
Piling on what others have said, the Web wasn't even a thing until the early 90's. There was minimal commercial value in a domain name at that point, so no incentive to squat on it and try to extort money. What did your average business or person care about a domain name in 1987? It wasn't one of the most critical pieces of your brand, as it is now.
Nobody saw a value in domain names. People didn't think we'd run out of domains. People didn't think that the internet would become mainstream, or that it would continue to exist in that form for a long time.
For that matter, /8 blocks were given out, if not quite like candy, certainly with considerable abandon. A fair number of the early universities and companies who registered ended up with complete /8 blocks all to themselves.
[EDIT: Duh. Of course, it was actually Class A blocks at the time.]
Just to nitpick, this was before CIDR, so you're probably referring to Class A blocks, of which there were only 125 (the first octet being 1-9,11-126).
Totally. ;) In all seriousness, I had friends who emailed Internic with fake company names and their home address. They received a Class C allocation in about a month.
Halliburton had 34.* and 134.132.* as of 2015 when I last worked there, but I looked a few months ago and they've sold off some of that /8 to Amazon and others.... A lot of places with /8s are fixing their wasteful allocations and making good money off of it.
There was actually no registration fee at all until 1997. I registered several domains that were "free" and remember having to pay $99/year for them at one point...
Yeah, after I posted that I realized that what I was remembering was a lot of fuss that they were going to charge, although I could have sworn that was more like 94-95ish. I do remember thinking that the amount was such that it'd not impact large companies but an individual, such as poor college students like myself at the time, might find it onerous.
