isna.org: the movement moves online
Domain registration (1994) and the earliest surviving capture of the ISNA website (1998)
A provenance record for the Intersex Society of North America’s website: the registration of the isna.org domain in 1994, and the earliest known capture of the site in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, in 1998.
Headnote
I registered isna.org on 31 October 1994 — a year after ISNA was announced in a letter published in The Sciences. The domain has outlived the organization itself: ISNA closed in 2008, and the site is now preserved as a historical archive by interACT. The newsletter reached the people who already knew to look for us. The website was how the people who didn’t found us. I recall that I hurried to register a domain name and set up a basic website just before some bit of media that refused to publish our mailing address went to print.
No capture of the earliest version of the site survives. The oldest one the Internet Archive holds dates to 12 December 1998, four years after the domain was registered — a reminder that the open web forgets quickly, and that what we have is the earliest surviving trace, not the first page we put up.
The evidence
Domain registration. The isna.org domain was registered on 1994-10-31 (31 October 1994, 05:00:00 UTC), per the domain registry’s record (Registered On: 1994-10-31T05:00:00.691Z).
Earliest known capture. The earliest snapshot of the site held by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was captured on 1998-12-12 (12 December 1998, 03:00:50 UTC):
https://web.archive.org/web/19981212030050/http://www.isna.org/
Source & citation
This page is generated to mirror the catalog record, so the two never drift.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Catalog id | isna-org-website |
| Date | 1994-10-31 (domain registration); earliest capture 1998-12-12 |
| Medium | Website / web capture |
| Source | Internet Archive Wayback Machine capture 19981212030050; domain registry record |
| Held at | Live capture at the Internet Archive; site preserved by interACT |
| Rights | ISNA’s own website — full rights. WHOIS date and Wayback capture are public records. |
| Status | Cleared |
Suggested citation. Cheryl Chase, isna.org: the movement moves online. The Bo Laurent Papers, catalog isna-org-website. Earliest capture: Internet Archive Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/19981212030050/http://www.isna.org/, captured 12 December 1998. Domain registered 31 October 1994.