Recovered 'automaster' source code, from an email forwarded c/o Alastair Varnals.

An email-bot that processed applications for "....uk" domains through a multi-stage application process and turned them into registration requests to the appropriate authority when the application process completed.

See "README" for the original readme/instructions.

I lost all my archives of 90s stuff in 2002 during the process of discovering that first-generation CD-Writers generated enough heat to set parts of a hard disk on fire.

Alastair Varnals (formerly netforce.co.uk) was kind enough to forward me a copy of the code that the bot had sent him back in 1996.

To cope with the rapid rise in use of the ".uk" domain, especially ".co.uk", the ".uk" administrators had invited staff from key ISPs to a mailing list called "The Naming Committee".

On becoming Demon Internet's hostmaster ~1994, I was also tasked with automating as much of the role as possible, and at the time the Naming Committee was an honor-based manual process.

Apparently I posted a suggestion for a simple, machine and human readable template format. Just an iteration of the then-popular "key: value" style form, and probably encouraged by David Kessens' RIPE-NCC database forms.

I vaguely remember a message, possibly by Ivan Pope, possibly framing automating the task of processing domain applications in a way that would try to ensure fairness (preventing another Burger King vs McDonalds, for example) as bordering on impossible.

To which I replied a few hours later with "you mean like this?" and followed with the first email exchange thru automaster@demon.net.

(It was probably same-day or next day, although various other people who ought to know have told me it was mere hours later. shrug maybe I'd broken ground on it the day before?)

This was an attempt to avoid an overbearing governing body or political involvement. The concern and risk was that if people were allowed to grab names, especially in the co.uk space, that were registered for business use to their very competitors, the legal uproar and money would wind up with the government inserting itself.

So, the ask was that when an ISP wanted a domain for their customer, they submit the details in a message to the list with the desired domain and trading name of the company.

C.f "McDonalds" asking for "burgerking.co.uk" would not be granted.

In 94 when the movie "The Professional" came out in the UK as "Leon", the UK marketing company just assumed they'd be getting "leon.co.uk", and I'd confused people by objecting to our own application; "co.uk" names had to correspond to the trading name (registered mark) of a business.

Unfortunately there was money involved, so by 1996 we were seeing lots of attempts to grab names. Sadly, some of them were certain ISPs trying to domain-squat/customer poach.

One of the main intents behind automaster was reducing the cognitive burden of the people monitoring the list. A sort of linter for domain applications.

A local filter on my workstation piped email from the list thru the script. The script would track domain requests in a db file, as well as monitor for votes and a cron job for automatically promoting applications to requests, once the waiting period expired.

If you sent it an email with subject "send code", it would send you a copy of itself.

Which - is how we have this copy.

This file (README.md) was not in the original.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Send Code
Date: Wed, 15 May 1996 11:50:44 +0000
From: Domain.Register@www.nic.uk
Reply-To: hostmaster@www.nic.uk
To: Alastair Varnals <elided>
 
Please find below the current UK Naming Co automaton code. The code has
been tar'd -> compress'd -> uuencoded. If you're trying to view it
under DOS or Windows, now's probably a good time to give up ;-).
 
Please read the files "COPYRIGHT" and "README" after extracting. Any
comments or improvements to hostmaster@www.nic.uk.
 
Regards,
 
 
Oliver

<uuencoded, tar, gzipd content elided>