The Story
'Twas October 1998. The web was young, and so were the opportunities. Rich Clingman, a programmer since 1971 (he was just 14!), ran automated dictionary searches looking for unclaimed words—real English words that might still be available as .com domains. Among the handful he found and registered: twas.
He knew immediately what to do with it. His sister sold antiques, and eBay was changing how collectibles found buyers. But eBay in 1999 wasn't easy—sellers needed help with photos, HTML, listing strategies. So twas.com became "Total Web Auction Service" (or "The Way Antiques Sell," depending on who asked). The site's marketing copy leaned into the wordplay: "'Twas a little knickknack 200 years ago. Now it's a valuable antique."
The business offered everything an antique seller might need: photo scanning and enhancement, HTML coding, image hosting, auction tracking, even on-site photography and training. It was a full-service operation built before such services were common—years before eBay and others absorbed these functions into their platforms.
Time passed. The auction assistance business ran its course. But the domain remained, and eventually a different idea took hold. The word "twas" belonged to something bigger than any business—it belonged to every American who had ever heard the opening line of the most famous Christmas poem ever written. "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house..."
Rich transformed the site into a gift: a complete, illustrated presentation of Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem, using original artwork from early public domain editions. Visitors could page through the verses, each stanza paired with period illustrations of children in bed, stockings by the fire, and St. Nicholas himself.
The Internet Archive tells the rest. From January 1999 through August 2024, it captured 135 snapshots of the site—a quarter century of active use. The domain never changed hands. It simply waited, carrying its cultural weight, for whoever might give it its next chapter.
The next chapter is now ready for you to write.
