Alright, story time!

I was hired to develop the firstbits website and generate addresses to potentially sell in the future.  The sale of the addresses would help support hosting the site, and would hopefully provide extra profit beyond that.  The website was created and we spent quite a lot of time putting together a dictionary of English words + names to search for.  I put together a computer and ran 6 or 7 batches of them over a few days/weeks using a python script, saving any addresses that matched the criteria and sending a satoshi to eat to "claim" those firstbits before anyone else.  Initially, I had sent 0.1 BTC to each and then recovered it back to a different address (that was interesting, to have to generate a transaction from an air-gapped machine!).  Decided later on it was simpler to send a satoshi to each address and leave it there.

However, there was a lot of criticism for the firstbits idea, for good reason.  Definitely some benefits, but big dangers as well, chief of which (in my mind) was the webserver getting hacked and the database or website being changed.  As the blockchain exploded in size, the database became a bit unwieldy and I wasn't much of a data guy back then so rather than invest a bunch of time in the issues, we turned off the website.  I still have the domain.

Royse777 - yes, you would have to trust me to use the address, that's a given.  Similar to early Casascius coins, I suppose.  Could still be used to sign messages if you didn't want to send any BTC to the address!