It was
originally a
phonebook service for various
organizations. For a long time, most whois clients
defaulted to the
US Military's phonebook. It was a lot of
fun to see if you could find various
obscene military designations. One night out of sheer boredom, I
did, in fact, find a
Major Woody,
Private Dick, and
Major Dick, as well as a few other name-rank pairs with fun
connotations.
On the phonebook front, whois was replaced by finger (which gave .plan files) and, later on, finger was replaced by homepages and various CGI-based phonebook tools, like the one NMSU has setup which helped this one guy stalk me for a while.
Unfortunately, now it's a Major Payne (also a real military person) in order to search on the com/net/org TLDs. At least the ICANN stuff makes it easier to find out where to search on non-generic TLDs such as cx and the like.
On a related note, we still have a gopher server at NMSU. Scary.