earth.li started because JonathanMcDowell and others(?), who were then at Keble College, Oxford, thought it would be cool to have a domain to do things with. earth.ie was considered but the registry were arsey about residency requirements, as was the registry for earth.aq, so earth.li was chosen. The original EarthlingsCouncilOfThirteen each contributed £5 and in return had domain names under earth.li pointed at their machines. They also got @earth.li email addresses.
earth.li DNS was handled by some machines within the Oxford domain: orange ran the primary DNS, and feeble was a secondary (I think there were more but can't remember which). [http://www.earth.li www.earth.li ] originally pointed at kami.keble, with a web page asking people to look at the real webserver which was hosted on heaven.on.earth.li.
Unfortunately this soon aroused the ire of [http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ Oxford University Computing Services], who claimed that this was against the rules despite the relevant rules making no mention of anything of the kind. Nonetheless the network access of orange and feeble was blocked until they stopped running earth.li DNS and pointing earth.li names at other Oxford machines. The rules were subsequently altered to explicitly ban people from pointing external domain names at .ox.ac.uk machines without permission.
The hosting of earth.li was moved to (Pair Networks? can't really remember this bit too well (DNS was Granite Canyon but I can't remember what the rest was)) and the email addresses (and web space?) continued there for some months, until the opportunity arose for AdrianChadd to colocate a machine for us in Amsterdam for free. Thus was born the.earth.li, which was built out of various parts found lying around or bought by contributions from EarthlingsEarthBuilders. the was duly taken to Amsterdam and entered service hosting earth.li, but its connection proved unreliable and hosting of earth.li was quickly moved back to (??).
Thus things remained until the Summer of 2000, when JonathanMcDowell had left university and was able to build a new the.earth.li and host it with (who?), where it remained until it was moved to a rack belonging to [http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk Black Cat Networks], which is run by SimonHuggins and JonathanMcDowell (who are both earthlings).