The first one was makeashorterlink.com, but obviously the guys at tinyurl had a 9 character advantage! It also redirects instantly, whereas the other one has an intermediate page.

It also does a lookup on exisiting URLs - so they don't have 20000 different entries for "disney.com"

This is the earliest Usenet reference to them (slightly useless too!), and http://tinyurl.com/1 makes it obvious that the guy owns the site. Most of the early references are from him, and people on similar topics,

Gareth