In 1994, it was the first to register. As registration was a manual process requiring human intervention, errors were made.
I remember receiving other registrants' confirmation emails on more than one occasion and had to email back the person at "hostmaster@internic.net" to have them take my NIC handle off of the domain and return control of the rightful owner.
Doesn't that mean that the 'other company whose initials are MCI' has equal rights to that domain name?