In any case, before leaving in 1990 or 1991 I had toyed with the idea of putting together a mail server on a loaner computer that had shown up in the newsroom from NeXt, Steve’s Jobs’s interim company while he was in exile from Apple.

It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t going to be my own system administrator, at which point I quickly moved markoff@nyt.com to Internex, an ISP based in Menlo Park, Calif., that was the first ISDN (broadband of its day!) internet service provider in Northern California.

At that point there were few people in the mainstream media world using email. Indeed, the Times masthead was alerted to the impending impact of electronic mail only after Bill Gates came to lunch with the paper’s editors. When they asked Mr. Gates how he ran his company, he told them he used this thing called “email.” Of course, in traditional Times-style, that generated this A1 story.

There was a brief period in which using electronic mail as a technology reporter was a competitive advantage. It was a way to directly contact people in organizations, cutting out the middleman. That quickly changed, yet my proto-Times email address would live happily in obscurity until it was compromised by an on-the-run computer outlaw named Kevin Mitnick. He believed that I was attempting to track him down. He broke into Internex and began spying on my email account, a fact I was made aware of when a digital Sherlock Holmes named Tsutomu Shimomura actually began pursuing Mr. Mitnick, after having been deputized to do so by the then-assistant United States attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice (who is now Google’s general counsel). It took about two weeks, but Mr. Shimomura would help the F.B.I. apprehend Mr. Mitnick in Raleigh-Durham, N.C. Because I was being spied on, I found that I had become part of the story.

The next year, in 1995, when The Times finally went online, I dutifully offered the nyt.com domain to the paper. To my surprise, initially The Times turned my offer down. (Do you have any idea what a three-letter domain is worth these days?) I was told that nyt.com would be confused with the internet address of New York Telephone, which still existed at the time.

Recently I learned from Walter Baranger, one of the paper’s early telecommunications people, that to put the paper online he and a group of IT systems people sat in a room and picked the paper’s domain name. Although nyt.com was a contender, it lost out to nytimes.com after a fair amount of debate.

For about a year I continued to receive mail at markoff@nyt.com. I didn’t bother to run a web server — as I would infamously note several years later, my “blog” was www.nytimes.com — and so anyone who typed nyt.com would end up with a dreaded “404” error.