Thurb is a word invented by Alexei Panshin in the late 1960s for his light-hearted and delightful sf novels Star Well, The Thurb Revolution, and Masque World (available as one combined e-book under the title New Celebrations). The word is used to describe the sound of a musical art form practised by a toad-like alien species and unappreciated by most humans. As such, it's vaguely analogous to this Web site.
A brief history of thurb.com
In September 1996 I started a Web site on CompuServe, at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jpalfrey.
In May 1999 I registered the thurb.com Internet domain with NameSecure, but it functioned only as an alias, automatically redirecting people to my Web site on CompuServe.
In those days, a .com domain was the thing to have, whatever sort of content you intended to publish. If I were choosing a domain now, I might choose thurb.info or palfrey.name, but I'm fond of thurb.com by now and see no real need to change it.
In November 2000 I finally moved my Web site off CompuServe, so that http://www.thurb.com/ became a real Web site, hosted by Burlee Networks.
Burlee was taken over by Interland in April 2003, but I continued with my Burlee hosting plan until May 2005, when I switched over to one of Interland's own hosting plans.
Interland changed its name to Web.com in March 2006.
On the 13th of June, 2020, Web.com abruptly switched off my Web site and e-mail services without any explanation or other communication. I sent an enquiry but got no reply, so I moved to Runbox.