Who Was Online First in the Tri-Cities: The Fifteen Oldest Domains, Verified

Updated October 13, 2026. After this ran, some of the people who built the region's first internet services wrote in, and one of them paid for a week of newspapers.com and came back with three pages from 1995. The ranking gained a domain and lost a mislabel, and the section on who was first got a lot more interesting without getting any more settled. Every change, and who it came from, is listed at the end under What changed in this update.

The oldest domain name still registered in the Tri-Cities was created on February 12, 1993, by a computer graphics shop in Kingsport. Not Eastman. Not ETSU. Not an internet provider, because there weren't any here yet. zfx.com went on the books more than a year and a half before anyone in the region was selling dial-up, and more than three years before a local daily newspaper had a domain of its own.

"Still registered" is doing real work in that sentence. A name that expired in 1998 leaves no registry record today, so any list built this way is a list of survivors. What follows is the fifteen oldest I could verify, not a complete census of every name that ever pointed here. The dead don't show up in whois.

Eastman was second, and closer than you'd think. The company registered emn.com on July 29, 1993, five months after ZFx. By June 1994 a chemist at Eastman's Kingsport research lab was signing a trade newsletter letter with an emn.com email address. The eastman.com everyone knows came later, in May 1995, and the public website switched on that October.

I went looking for this because, as far as I can tell, nobody had. The question was simple. Take every domain you can tie to a Tri-Cities organization (or, it turns out, a Tri-Cities person), pull the registration date from the registry, and sort. What you get is a record of who decided the internet was real, and when, one organization at a time. Nobody registered a domain in 1994 by accident. Somebody had to make the case, find the money, and find the one person in the building who knew how. In 1994 that person was usually also in charge of the printer.

Every date below was pulled directly from the domain registries on September 6, 2026, and the ones added in the October update were pulled again on October 13. The method is at the bottom, along with the reasons a registry date is not the same thing as a website. That distinction turns out to be most of the story.

The first fifteen

Two things stand out before you read any further down the list. Four of the first ten are internet providers, which is the expected pattern, and two more belong to a pair of friends who were about twenty, one running a bulletin board and one running a fan site, who would go on to start an ISP together. And three of the first twelve are Eastman-related, twice as the company and once as its credit union. In 1995 the credit union of a chemical company had a domain before any hospital, daily newspaper, city, or county in the region. Make of that what you will. I made a chart.

The full verified list ran to 184 regional domains when this was first published, and six more have been added since. The next dozen after the fifteen above are worth a glance because they show the second wave arriving all at once. jcmc.com, Johnson City Medical Center, on March 27, 1996, which this update bumped to sixteenth. xtn.net, the Greeneville Sun's dial-up business, on April 13, 1996. wcyb.com three days later. Blackburn, Childers & Steagall, the accounting firm, two days after that. bristolnews.com, the Herald Courier's original domain, and wellmont.org on the same day, April 22, 1996. The Elizabethton Star's original starhq.com in May. Jonathan Harrington's infocs.com in July, for a Kingsport web shop that set out to put every business in downtown Kingsport online at $50 a page. "We tried to create a 'Virtual Kingsport' before it was cool," he says. Nobody bought one. The domain is still his. Bank of Tennessee in October. Milligan and WJHL in November. Citizens Bank in December. Nineteen regional registrations in 1996 against seven the year before.

What the order tells you

The sector order is close to what you'd guess, with a few surprises in the gaps.

ISPs first, 1994 and 1995. Preferred Internet and TriCon in Kingsport (TriCon's founder dates the business to November 1994, a month before its domain), Expanding Technologies in Johnson City (whose xtc.net lapsed long ago, which is why it isn't ranked), NetAccess in Abingdon, MountaiNet, and the Greeneville Sun's XTN. PC Labs in Elizabethton says it started dial-up in 1995 as well, though its domain came in 1997. The region had at least six local providers before it had a single government website.

Business and media next, 1995 to 1997. The Business Journal was online before the daily papers, and was hosting WCYB's page in 1995. Food City registered in January 1996 and had a site archived by December. The TV stations got their own domains in 1996. The newspapers took longer. The Herald Courier registered bristolnews.com in April 1996, the Times News registered timesnews.net in August 1997, and the Johnson City Press did not register johnsoncitypress.com until April 1999. Kingsport beat Johnson City to a newspaper domain by twenty months. The Press did register on the same day somebody registered johnsoncity.com, which may or may not be a coincidence.

Hospitals and colleges, 1996 and 1997. Johnson City Medical Center and Wellmont in spring 1996. Tusculum, Emory & Henry, Milligan, King, and ETSU between February 1996 and September 1997. The ETSU date is misleading, and I'll come back to it.

Chambers of commerce in 1997, churches from 1998. Bristol's and Kingsport's chambers registered within a month of each other in mid-1997. First Broad Street United Methodist in Kingsport was the first church I found, in February 1998, followed by Higher Ground Baptist that July. Most church domains date from 2000 onward.

Governments last. The City of Bristol, Tennessee registered bristoltn.org on February 26, 1997, the first local government domain in the region. Bristol, Virginia had a site archived in April 1997. Johnson City followed in April 1999. Kingsport, the city where all of this started, did not register kingsporttn.gov until February 2008, by which point you could have looked it up on an iPhone. Chattanooga had its .gov in October 1997. Whatever address Kingsport used before 2008 is one of the loose ends of this piece, and if you remember it, I'd like to hear from you. Sullivan County's .gov dates from 2011, Hawkins County's from 2006, and Washington County still runs on a .org registered in 2010.

Against the neighbors, the Tri-Cities looks ordinary in the middle and slow at both ends. Our newspaper and hospital dates sit inside the same 1995 to 1999 band as Knoxville, Chattanooga, Asheville, and Roanoke. Our universities' current domains are late. UT Knoxville and Virginia Tech have held their .edu names since 1987, UNC Asheville since 1989, UT Chattanooga since 1993. The earliest surviving .edu here dates from 1996, though ETSU's older name, covered below, means the true first date is unknown. City governments' current domains are later still, with the exception of Bristol, and a current domain says nothing about when a city or a paper first went online under some other name.

A registration is not a website

This is where the ranking stops being trivia and starts being a lesson in evidence. A domain's creation date is the day a name was claimed. It says nothing about when a site went live, and it can badly understate how long an organization had been online.

The best evidence of that is a trade magazine. On September 4, 1995, Broadcasting & Cable printed an "Internet TV Directory" listing every television station in the country with a web address. Three Tri-Cities stations made the list. WKPT and WJHL were at addresses under tricon.net, and WCYB was at bjournal.com/wcyb.html. All three were online in the summer of 1995 as pages on somebody else's server. WCYB got its own domain seven months later. WJHL took fourteen months. WKPT, whose wkpt.com dates from December 2002, had a web page seven years before it had a domain, which is a long time to read a URL with a slash in it over the air.

Eastman is the same story in the other direction. It registered eastman.com in May 1995 and the Rochester Business Journal reported the site's launch on October 1, 1995. The Internet Archive did not capture it until October 1996. If you dated Eastman's web presence by the archive, you'd be a year late. If you dated it by the registry, you'd be five months early. And if you dated it by emn.com, you'd be back in 1993. Same company, four dates, and every one of them is defensible in the right argument.

ETSU is the one that should make anyone doing this kind of research nervous. The EDUCAUSE registry says etsu.edu was activated on September 12, 1997. The Internet Archive has www.etsu.edu captured on December 26, 1996, nine months earlier. The university's alumni magazine had an item about the ETSU home page in the fall of 1995. And ETSU was also using a second name, etsu-tn.edu, which the archive captured in November 1996 and which was still appearing in the university's own job notices at the end of 1997. I don't have an explanation for how www.etsu.edu was archived before the registry says the name was activated. It may be a re-registration, it may be how EDUCAUSE migrated its records, and it may be something else. I'm leaving it unresolved. Somebody at EDUCAUSE knows, and I'd rather be corrected by them than be confidently wrong on my own website. What it demonstrates is enough on its own: same institution, three sources, three different years, and each source is correct about the one thing it measures.

Since this was first published I've learned ETSU had yet another name, and that its first web server may not have been ETSU's idea. Chris Heschong, a student there in 1993, says the university's domain at the time was east-tenn-st.edu, pointed at a mainframe, with no website. So he started running a web server that answered at that address. It was one page. Eventually, in his words, the university "realized some random student who was failing out of his classes was running their (single-page html) website" and asked him to hand it over to IT. He did, left ETSU not long after, and by the end of 1994 was running the internet side of a bulletin board in Kingsport. More on that below.

The names that got away

The ranking above is of names still registered today. That rule hides as much as it shows, so here is what it hides.

Names that outlived their owners. zfx.com belongs to a forex outfit now. Its creation date never reset, which means the name never expired, and Dave Sieg says he sold it years ago. preferred.com sits on Wix with an unrelated business behind it, and its Wayback record runs unbroken from December 1996 to this June, 402 captures. tricon.net is parked. cv.org, which I originally credited to Expanding Technologies, was Andy Couch's Faith No More fan site. Heschong remembers the band mentioning it on MTV, in what he calls one of the first mentions of a website on the network. It now points somewhere with nothing to do with Couch or Faith No More. Four of the first eight regional domains no longer belong to anyone from the region. The names outlasted the companies, which is more than you can say for most of the office furniture.

The exception is the one I missed. wiw.org, registered April 4, 1994, is still Chris Heschong's, and Couch says his 1994 email address there still works. Heschong registered it for his Johnson City bulletin board, the Virtual Screwdriver. The name came from chatting with callers and typing "wiw that's cool" when he meant wow. He picked .org, he says, because in 1994 a .com wanted a business license and a .net wanted a network diagram, and a teenager's bulletin board had neither. The account behind it goes back to January 12, 1994, when Colorado SuperNet mailed him a welcome letter for dial-in service with the login Uwiw. After that, every night, the board called Colorado long distance to trade email and Usenet posts. A year later the Kingsport Times-News explained that before local providers arrived, people here "had to call long-distance telephone numbers in places such as Virginia and Colorado" to get online. At least one of those Colorado calls was his.

Names that dropped and came back. When a domain is deleted and registered again, its creation date resets. You can catch it when the Internet Archive has the site before the registry says the name existed. bristolva.org was captured in April 1997 but its current record starts in December 1998. downtownkingsport.org was online in 1999 and re-registered in 2002. com-tek.com, a Johnson City technology firm, was archived in December 1996 and its record now starts in 2013. xtc.net, Expanding Technologies' domain, was registered in May 1995 by Heschong's account and lapsed; its current record starts in August 2003. kingsportspeedway.com, which Jonathan Harrington built and maintained in the 1990s, is in the archive by January 1999, and its current registration dates from November 2018. Those are the real drops.

Decoys. The same test throws false positives. msha.com was captured in December 1996, two years before Mountain States Health Alliance registered it and two years before the alliance existed. The 1996 site belonged to someone else with the same initials, which is the internet's oldest problem and still unsolved. brightridge.com has a 1998 capture and a 2002 registration; the BrightRidge name wasn't adopted by the Johnson City Power Board until 2018. An early capture proves a site existed at that address, not that it was yours.

Names that aren't ours. usit.net, registered in March 1994, would sit third if I let it, behind only the two 1993 names. It was U.S. Internet of Knoxville, which sold dial-up here and eventually bought PC Labs' subscribers, but it was never a Tri-Cities registration. netaccess.net, June 1994, looked like Abingdon's NetAccess until its nameservers turned out to belong to a Philadelphia ISP of the same name. One of the research tools I used confidently described it as a Southwest Virginia company. It isn't. It was very sure, though. And fox39.com, registered July 4, 1996, which the first version of this piece listed as WEMT's. I can't tie it to WEMT. It sits with a corporate registrar, and America has more than one Fox 39. By Heschong's account, WEMT's early site lived at fox39.xtc.net, on Expanding Technologies' server, and he sent an Internet Archive link with it there in January 1998.

Who was first, and why I'm still not going to settle it

The registry says Preferred Internet beat TriCon to a domain by 59 days. Dave Sieg, who founded ZFx in Kingsport in 1990 and turned its internet connection into TriCon, dates TriCon's start to November 1994, a month before the domain. ZFx had owned zfx.com since February 1993 and was managing the website for Sobel's, a downtown men's clothing store, in 1995, which the Kingsport Public Library's finding aid calls the first commercial website of any store in the city. Sieg has since sent me a TriCon commercial he shot, in which Norman Sobel explains what the internet did for his store. "We just got through sending a suit to the middle of China," Sobel says, "and we shipped some pants to Sweden and had a request for a hat from South Africa." It holds up better than most testimonials written since. The same commercial promises the whole thing costs "the same as a local call," which in the Tri-Cities of 1995 was the entire sales pitch.

When this piece first ran, I had two retrospective claims pointing in opposite directions. Chris Heschong's resume, still online, calls Preferred the first ISP based in Northeast Tennessee. A 2011 post by David Cate, whose own business co-located with TriCon in 1997, calls TriCon the region's first internet provider. Then Heschong himself wrote in, along with Andy Couch, who worked at Preferred with him, and Rick Roberts, who replaced him there.

Here is what they describe. Preferred Systems was Dan Watson's custom PC business, run out of the basement of his house on Cochise Trail in Kingsport and staffed mostly by high school kids, according to Couch, who started there in the spring of 1994. Watson also ran a bulletin board, The Preferred Board, mainly so customers could download drivers. Heschong, who had just dropped out of ETSU, talked Watson into hiring him to run it at the end of 1994, and they added internet access right away. Couch dates the launch to the end of October or early November 1994. Callers dialed into the board and dropped out to a Linux shell, which reached the rest of the internet over a dedicated 56K line from MCI, "considered amazing at the time," Heschong says, and they charged for it. The whole operation answered on four modems and four phone lines, two at 2400 baud and two at 9600 by Roberts' count, which means Preferred Internet could serve four people at once. "It's hard to imagine an ISP now that only supported four users at a time," Couch wrote.

Heschong remembers TriCon launching at the same moment and doing it like a business. "They were real professionals," he wrote. "I was like 19 at this point and I don't think anyone else who worked for Dan was even old enough to drink." His memory is that TriCon offered true direct dial-up first, distinct from Preferred's bulletin-board-and-shell setup, and that Preferred followed with the same kind of service shortly after. His verdict, thirty years on, is generous to the competition. "I feel like we can give Dave Sieg and Tricon credit for being the first company to try and bring the Internet to the area," he wrote. "Maybe us kids over at Preferred had claim to the first packets going across the wire, maybe even the first customers accessing the Internet through our gear." Couch is more economical. "As far as who was actually first to launch, Dan or Dave at TriCon, neither Chris or I really remember."

Then Heschong did something nobody else in this story had done, which was pay for a week of newspapers.com. On Sunday, January 15, 1995, page 6D of the Kingsport Times-News carried an ad for "The Preferred Board INTERNET," at $9.95 a month for six hours and $1.50 for each hour after that, with chris@preferred.com for questions. The data line in that ad, 323-2974, is the same number the FidoNet nodelist carried for The Preferred Board, so the ISP and the bulletin board really were the same phone line. Two days later the paper's editorial page said that "a new company called Preferred Board Internet is advertising what's believed to be the first local public high-speed Internet access. Another is supposed to go on-line soon." Heschong says the first mention he found of Sieg or The Tri-Cities Connection is from January 22.

On February 26 the business section put both of them in the same story, "Surfin' safari." Sieg, identified as president of Zeta Image in Kingsport, explained the internet to the city and introduced The Tri-Cities Connection at $45 to start and $60 a quarter for unlimited use. "The Tri-Cities really needed an Internet service provider," Heschong told the paper. "So we went ahead and set one up late last year." The same story says Preferred users paid no initial fee and were "billed $9.95 per hour of on-line time," which would have made the internet the most expensive hobby in Sullivan County. Preferred's own ad, six weeks earlier, says $9.95 a month.

The same argument happened again in Johnson City. In the spring of 1995 Heschong and Couch left Preferred, with Watson's blessing, to start Expanding Technologies on Main Street, because a call between the two cities cost about three cents a minute. They meant to be the first ISP with a Johnson City number and lost while waiting on phone lines, by a few weeks or a month or two, depending on who's telling it. Heschong remembers the winner as a company called Global Connection. Couch remembers it as TriCon, or possibly MountaiNet. Neither was keeping a log, and the registry doesn't settle it either.

What happened next is clearer. Roberts, hired in early 1995 while Preferred was still in Watson's basement, says it had around 100 customers when he started, about 5,000 when he left for a stint at NetAccess around 2000, and just under 10,000 when he left for good in 2004. By his recollection the Greeneville Sun's East Tennessee Network bought Preferred around 1997 or 1998 and was still using the Preferred Internet name when he left. Sieg's own history puts TriCon at around 2,000 subscribers before he sold it to NetAccess in 1997.

So here is where it stands. Preferred's ad was in print a week before anything I can find from TriCon, and the paper called it "believed to be" the first. The man who placed that ad gives the title to TriCon. Jonathan Harrington, who was a Preferred customer, gives it to Preferred. Couch and Roberts don't claim to know. Nobody has a first customer's name or a first bill. The disagreement is friendlier and better documented than it was a month ago, and I'm still not picking a winner from a desk thirty years later. The people who were there won't, and they were there.

How to check any of this yourself

Everything here rests on three lookups. None of them require an account, a budget, or a research assistant with strong opinions.

The registry. Every .com and .net has a public RDAP record at Verisign. Put a domain into https://rdap.verisign.com/com/v1/domain/eastman.com and look for the event marked registration. For .org, the equivalent is at rdap.publicinterestregistry.org. For .edu there is no RDAP, so you read the "Domain record activated" line from the EDUCAUSE whois. Third-party whois sites mirror these records, but they also cache and sometimes garble them, so go to the registry when the date matters.

The archive. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine will show you the earliest snapshot it holds for a domain. That date is evidence the site existed by then, not a launch date. The archive's crawlers were thin in 1996 and 1997, and a site could be up for a year before one found it. The CDX index at web.archive.org/cdx lets you list every capture for a domain, including subpages, which is how you find a hosted-sites list or a customer directory a plain search won't show.

The organization's own claim. "Online since 1995" on an About page is a claim, not a record. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it refers to an email address, and sometimes it's the year the founder remembers. Check it against the other two.

One more thing about how this was researched. I ran the same prompt through four AI research tools and then verified every date they returned against the registries myself. One of the four produced a clean, professional-looking table in which 33 of 38 dates were wrong, some by nine years, and it cited newspaper headlines that don't appear to exist. It was the best-formatted document I received all day. Another returned nine dates, all correct, and marked everything else Not Found. The lesson isn't that the tools are useless. Two of them found sources I'd have missed. The lesson is that a confident table of dates is the easiest thing in the world to fabricate, and the registries are one HTTP request away.

Where I come in

I registered my first domain for a client around 2002, an Oriental rug company whose owner walked into my PC repair shop and asked for a website. HTML and frames, a little Dreamweaver, underquoted, as is traditional. I submitted it to the Yahoo Directory and to a local Tri-Cities directory that no longer exists. By then the list above was already nine years old. Everything in this piece happened before I showed up, which is part of why I wanted to write it down.

When I took over the newspaper websites in 2012, timesnews.net was fifteen years old. I spent thirteen years working inside that domain and never once thought about who registered it or why it was a .net. The .net part is easy: timesnews.com had been taken since May 1995, there being several Times-Newses in America and only one of each domain. The rest of the answer, it turns out, is that in August 1997 the Kingsport Times News was later to the web than its own TV competitors, later than the Business Journal, later than the credit union, and still twenty months ahead of the Johnson City Press.

One more thing I didn't know until Heschong mentioned it. He remembers ZFx writing the first content management system the Times News site ran on. If that's right, the company behind the oldest domain in the region built the software under the website I spent thirteen years running. I've asked Sieg, and I'll report back.

This is the first of a series on the technology history of the Tri-Cities, which as far as I can find has never been told in one place. The region built a chemical company, a railroad town, an ammunition plant, and a nuclear fuel plant before it built a website. The domains are just the most recent layer, and the one with the cleanest records, which tells you something about the state of the older ones. The layer under this one, the bulletin boards, is in part two, Before the Web.

What changed in this update

This piece first ran on September 6, 2026. The October 13 update is based on emails and interviews with people who were there, three Kingsport Times-News pages from 1995, and a fresh pass through the registries. Here is everything that changed and who it came from.

• Added wiw.org at #3. Chris Heschong pointed out that his bulletin board's domain, registered April 4, 1994, belonged on the list. The registry agrees. Everything below it moved down one, and jcmc.com dropped from fifteenth to sixteenth.
• Corrected cv.org. I had it as Expanding Technologies' domain. It was Andy Couch's personal fan site, as Couch and Heschong both told me. Expanding Technologies used xtc.net, which lapsed and is now listed with the drops.
• Widened the scope sentence to include people as well as organizations, since two of the first eight are personal domains.
• Rewrote the section on who was first. New firsthand accounts from Heschong, Couch, and Rick Roberts on how Preferred started and grew, plus the January 15, January 17, and February 26, 1995 Times-News items Heschong found. The question is still open.
• Named Preferred's owner, Dan Watson, which Couch, Heschong, and Roberts each confirmed.
• Added east-tenn-st.edu and Heschong's account of running ETSU's first web server in 1993.
• zfx.com. Dave Sieg confirmed he sold the name. He also sent the TriCon commercial quoted above.
• Removed fox39.com from the 1996 list. I had attributed it to WEMT and can't support that.
• Added five of Jonathan Harrington's domains to the master list, including infocs.com, now in the 1996 second wave, and kingsportspeedway.com, now with the drops.
• Fixed the opening. The first local daily paper's domain came more than three years after zfx.com, not two and a half.
• Updated the charts. Figure 1 shows the new ranking. Figure 2 adds wiw.org and Harrington's domains and moves cv.org to a new personal-sites category, so 1996 now shows nineteen registrations instead of eighteen. Figure 3 adds Preferred's January 1995 ad as its first documented appearance in print.

Thanks to Chris Heschong, Andy Couch, Rick Roberts, Dave Sieg, and Jonathan Harrington, who were there and took the time to write it down. If you were there too and something here is still wrong, I'd like to hear it. That's how this version happened.

Sources and method

All registry dates were retrieved on September 6, 2026 from Verisign RDAP (.com, .net), Public Interest Registry RDAP (.org), the .gov registry RDAP, and the EDUCAUSE whois (.edu). Dates for domains added or changed in the update (wiw.org, cv.org, xtc.net, infocs.com, kingsportspeedway.com, fox39.com) were retrieved again on October 13, 2026. Earliest captures are from the Internet Archive's availability API for the bare domain; a fuller CDX pull may find earlier ones. The complete table of 184 regional domains with dates, current holders, and the source tying each domain to its organization is available on request.

• Broadcasting & Cable, "The Internet TV Directory," September 4, 1995, pp. 64 and 66
• Rochester Business Journal, "Business Notes," October 27, 1995 (eastman.com launch)
• Texas A&M NMR Newsletter no. 430, July 1994 (Eastman emn.com address, letter dated June 6, 1994)
• ASPP News, November/December 1997, p. 28 (ETSU etsu-tn.edu addresses)
• ETSU Alumni Quarterly index, Fall 1995, "Worldwide Web, ETSU home page"
• Kingsport Public Library, Sobel's Store, Inc. Collection finding aid
• Virginia State Corporation Commission, 1999 Annual Report (NetAccess, Abingdon)
• Gregg K. Jones, "Should Newspapers Offer Internet Access?" Nieman Reports, 2002
• Christopher Heschong, resume (Preferred Internet, 1994 to 1995)
• David Cate, "Remembering the corner office in Kingsport's downtown," April 17, 2011
• Dave Sieg, personal history (ZFx founded 1990; TriCon from November 1994)
• Internet Archive, jcmc.com, January 10, 1998 capture
• PC Labs, About (Carter County dial-up, 1995)
• Internet Archive, preferred.com, December 21, 1996 capture
• Kingsport Times-News, Preferred Board Internet advertisement, January 15, 1995, p. 6D
• Kingsport Times-News, "Bring government out of the shadows," editorial, January 17, 1995, p. 6A
• Amy Dickeson, "Surfin' safari," Kingsport Times-News, February 26, 1995, p. 1C
• Colorado SuperNet, welcome letter for dial-in service, January 12, 1994, courtesy of Chris Heschong
• TriCon television commercial featuring Norman Sobel, undated, courtesy of Dave Sieg
• Chris Heschong, emails to the author, September 2026
• Andy Couch, emails to the author, September 2026
• Rick Roberts, interview with the author, September 2026
• Dave Sieg, correspondence with the author, September 2026
• Jonathan Harrington, emails to the author, September 2026

Not Found after four research passes and a day of verification: any 1994 to 1999 Kingsport Times News, Johnson City Press, or Bristol Herald Courier article describing a local website with a citable date and page; the City of Kingsport's web address before 2008; the exact URL of the 1995 Sobel's site; an archived customer list from any local ISP; and a primary record that settles which ISP signed the first customer.