[RupertSalt]

I found it!

https://rscott.org/OldInternetFiles/network-contacts.1996061...

I had named it "HEARTLAND" rather than a Cthulhu-related name, which was hindering my searches. I had also asked Gemini and it hallucinated a historical record which it was unable/unwilling to link.

The network was: 192.160.182.0/24

ARIN still has the history: https://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/192.160.182.0?s=192.160.182.0

My original assigned user handle was: RE229 (a prime number, very on-brand)

My Netcom email address and a San Jose phone number are enshrined in the record. Don't bother contacting me through those! Interestingly, if you spell out the phone number, it ends in "NET", but does not spell anything compelling in its entirety.

[icedchai]

This is great. You still "own" it, as it still exists in "whois" and ARIN records! The problem is it is assigned to an email address you no longer have access to. You might need to contact ARIN to get back control of it... seems possible since it's in your name and not a company.

[RupertSalt]

That is baffling. I swear that I heard or received a direct communiqué, many many years ago, that ARIN and ICANN and IANA were sweeping out all of the unannounced networks and reclaiming them. Word went out during the initial pressure of address space exhaustion.

So if this is really still assigned to "me" as boss of "my company" I suppose nobody else has ever announced it. It has no BGP behind it. In fact, 192.160.0.0/16 has no BGP at all. That is a huge swath of space to be vacant.

So, in 34 years since its registration, no BGP announcement, no ASN has ever been associated with this Class-C, and it still "belongs to me", unpaid, un-rented? It boggles my mind. I had expected that it was easier to lose an unused IPv4 network than to lose a domain name from back in the day.

Now there is a lot of crazy contact information that is so, so old. It is credible but I barely recall even having some of those phone numbers. There's an email address at cts.com. Which appears to be utterly defunct now but it was a San Diego bboard run by "Bill Blue". I distinctly recall a lot of Usenet posters using "crash.cts.com" and it was a "shell account" provider. It would've been in-character for past-me to sign up there at some point. Some point, I don't know.

So it says they last attempted to contact me 16 years ago. Did they send a letter in the USPS? Did my family receive nothing? So weird. If I literally wrote to them with that return address, would they validate me?

I literally have no idea how I could even use a /24 network today. My ISP wouldn't accept it. I can't exactly run BGP from a Chromebook or Netgear router at home! I suppose the only way to use it would be on a VPS service? Would the VPS announce an old-school "personal" network?

[icedchai]

You may have been looking in the wrong spot? You can see plenty of prefixes in 192.160.0.0/16 currently announced. Check out https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history

When ARIN contacts you, it's through email. They send an email with a confirmation link, so that probably bounced.

You can definitely announce BGP from a VPS with some providers. I have been doing this for years. Vultr will do it. However, they will validate (through email) that you "own" the block.

My recommendation is you first contact ARIN and see if you can "recover" contact info associated with the class C.

There are some restrictions around legacy blocks that predate the existing of ARIN. For some reason, they cannot reclaim them easily. So they just sit there...