Perhaps the NXDOMAIN response was cached by ISPs for an especially long time because it was such a frequently visited hostname?
Why would you need VS6 to compile a program for Linux?
Or you just prefer to pay someone cash for them to top up your domain, because you don't like mixing money and the internet, but have e.g. a personal domain for email.
This actually reminds me on a somewhat interesting social engineering "vulnerability" a little while back[0].
1. The hacker would call into Amazon and say that the website was acting up and they needed to add a card to the victim's account. It wouldn't take much effort because why would it?
2. The hacker'd call right back and say that "their" email had been compromised and they needed to change it/add a new one and reset the password. You supply the card you just gave (and name/billing address, but those aren't too hard to find)
3. Use that to hop on to the account and grab the last 4 digits of the victim's real card.
You now have the victim's billing address and last 4 of a credit card. A surprising amount of authentication power.
I think the lesson here is if it can be privileged information, it is. Even if it's privileged for someone else.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking...
SSL had been around for 6 years already, credit card transactions were quite common, especially with known, reputable hosts (Network Solutions can be safely be assumed to have qualified at the time)
People who used mail orders before the internet might remember that the options included sending a cheque along with the order form or filling in your credit card details on the order form (that's a paper form that you send in the post), and I think that this is still the case. So I don't think that average people really saw sending card details online any differently. I even remember being asked for my card details by email!
But, yeah, paying on-line with credit cards was absolutely a thing in 1999.
Presumably Network Solutions was trusted by this customer of theirs.
There were thousands of online shops at the time, selling everything that Amazon sells today, and it was common to purchase from them using CC or PayPal.
I'm not sure it's even so much that PayPal "popularized" online payments as it somewhat democratized them. When I had a small side software business in the early to mid-90s, it wasn't easy/cheap to get setup with a merchant credit card. Mostly, people mailed me checks although at some point I struck a deal with a local BBS operator/reseller for him to take payments for me when necessary.
