He's also famous enough that whenever I see ntlworld.com [1] I immediately think, "Ah, must be JdBP - that'll be worth reading."

[1] It's actually slightly astonishing his hosting still works at that URL given that NTL was consumed by Virgin nearly a decade ago.

I must admit, I felt a pang of nostalgia seeing that domain name. Must have been nearly 15 years ago that we got our super-fast 64k connection with free ntlworld.com web hosting, and we could finally have always-on internet at home. Oh how things have changed..

Wrt hostnames RFC 1738 just refers back to 1034/35, which came 7 years earlier. It'd be pretty sad if we couldn't get this right after 28+ years