Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs
cambus.net
cambus.net
I was eventually laid off along with about 30% of the company. I saw people who worked there for 18 years brought to tears because BBN was all they knew. My key take away was that experience was that no matter how impactful your tech company is on society, leadership's vision really determines the trajectory.
I also have on a couple of occasions worked at Eli Lilly, who had a class A because they were early to the Internet; I found it vaguely humorous that between BBN and Lilly I'd worked on more class A networks than most people would ever have the opportunity to.
symbolics.com - Still exists
bbn.com - Redirects to raytheon.com
think.com - Dead
mcc.com - Redirects to thecryptogenius.com (sometimes, not sure what's going on with it)
dec.com - Redirects to paulkocher.com
northrop.com - Dead
xerox.com - Alive, Xerox website
sri.com - Alive
hp.com - Alive, HP website
bellcore.com - Dead
ibm.com - Alive, IBM website
sun.com - Alive, sun website (oracle.com)
intel.com - Alive, intel website
ti.com - Alive, Texas Instruments
att.com - Alive, ATT
gmr.com - Dead
tek.com - Alive, Tektronix website
fmc.com - Alive, FMC website
ub.com - Alive, United Bitcoin website
bell-atl.com - Dead
Of the 40 listed .com domains, the following are not in the list in the OP article: adelie.com buck.com cca.com mecc.com nbi.com next.com olivetti.com proteon.com pyr.com rca.com tmc.com vse.com
One of the five listed .org domains is not in the article: csc.org
The one listed .net domain is cs.net, also not in the article.
Even if someone else can wring some money out of it with ads or whatever, HPE isn't in that kind of business. Even for a big company, $60K is still $60K if you can get it for something that ha no value to you.
Nor does it surprise me that the post-merger leadership abandoned the domain name. I think that says a lot about their attitude ( acquire, grow, acquire )
They could’ve just pointed it to http://gm.com
I always forget that dashes are allowed in domain names.
I built this a while back:
https://linkpeek.com/blog/website-screenshot-of-every-two-le...
https://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-...
tl;dr: IANA reserved all the single-letter domains in 1993, except for some that had been grandfathered in.
All the two-letter .com domains are registered, and only available on the secondary market.
Symbolics -> Lisp Machines, Lisp software
BBN -> Jericho Lisp Machine, BBN Lisp, various Lisp applications
Thinking Machines -> Connection Machine CM1, a massive parallel accelerator for Symbolics Lisp Machine, *Lisp
MCC -> had a network of 100+ Lisp Machines, developed Cyc, Orion (a Lisp OODB) and a Lisp-based CAD system - amongst others
Xerox -> Interlisp, Interlisp-D Lisp Machine
SRI -> AI research with lots Lisp applications
I see 5 domains registered on Aug. 5th, 1986, then no more domains for another month. And 12 on Dec. 11 1986, then again another month with no registrations.
I hated having to use the InterNIC template when I was handling domain regs back at that place we were both involved with.
Note that this actually precedes the web by several years
The SRI NIC had a template file you'd fill out and email it in. For example, see RFC-1032: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1032
I registered my first .edu in 1986 (maybe 1987) and my first .com in 1988.
It was done similarly for getting IP blocks assigned. I emailed in a form around 1986 and got a class B assigned for my university (still in use).
EDIT: I operated a regional thing off BBN, and I could do the nasty bits of hoisting myself to administrative acceptance. I can't imagine what it must have required for someone just trying to 'join' before 1990-or-so.
> Respondent Yana Beklova, who at one stage worked for the Complainant, requested an amount between USD 500,000 and USD 1,000,000 for the transfer of the disputed domain name, that the registrant of the disputed domain name sought to hide its identity through a WhoIs privacy protection service, that the Respondents tried to transfer the disputed domain name out of the reach of the Australian courts to avoid legal proceedings after having received the cease and desist letter, that some of the Respondents named by the Complainant have been involved in previous UDRP proceedings, which suggests a pattern of conduct, and that the disputed domain name was registered to intentionally attract customers looking for the Complainant’s website for commercial gain by creating a likelihood of confusion.
IIRC, rice.edu was the 8th domain registered on the entire internet.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...
Of those, 18 are still currently registered but are not in Wikipedia's list: buffalo.edu colgate.edu du.edu houston.edu lehigh.edu merit.edu mosis.edu riacs.edu sdsu.edu sunysb.edu tmc.edu ucar.edu uchicago.edu uiowa.edu umb.edu uoregon.edu villanova.edu vt.edu
A further 7 are no longer registered: mich-state.edu ntsu.edu ogc.edu pittsburgh.edu ukans.edu wanginst.edu waterloo.edu
They had a rather respectful network in 1993, they probably had been running for more than 15 years by then.
ADDED: I do wonder if the date is fudged a bit. I suppose it's possible that both DARPA and Nordic network people were hard at work registering things on New Year's Day but I have my doubts :-)
And seeing fidonet.org brought back a wave of nostalgia.
I'm fairly sure if you extended the list to idk, 1000 or 10.000 you'd see all two/three letter domains being taken. Same with e.g. Twitter accounts. You might still have a chance with your local Slack team though.
First you had to know what the internet was.
There was a massive wave of domain-squatting round about 2000 in the dotcom boom, and as a result "trademark reform" was enacted to allow brands to confiscate their named domains from domain squatters.
Also, quite a lot of domains had specific requirements. You either had to be in the country, or a specific kind of business, or know the sysadmin running the registry personally.
[EDIT: Duh. Of course, it was actually Class A blocks at the time.]
Are you implying that they were printed out, individually packaged, and offered in a bowl?
Maybe a little out of date by now, but still, you can get a feel for it.
Apple, Ford, HP, DEC, Xerox, among others all have full /8 blocks.
Big mistake that was..........
I remember having a two-digit handle with InterNIC, too bad that wasn't worth anything. =)
created: 1985-01-01
Making it 2 months older than the earliest dot com on the list.
I wonder why you got a different date back?
string in the record (along with the 1996 date), so it's a bit confusing.
> This Site Is Under Construction and Coming Soon.
I won't hold my breath!
Back then (and to a lesser extent now), people tried to make commonly-typed commands as short as possible because keyboards were so beefy, and finger fatigue wasn't uncommon.
It's why the core Unix shell commands are things like "cp," instead of "copy."
This has a lot more to do with how slow the ASR-33 teletype was/is.
Picture a group of humans who evolve a new language. That language will likely start with short sounds, and then progressively build up to longer sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
Anyone who hasn't read A Mathematical Theory of Communication, you're missing out. It's quite readable and quite cool: http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...
I guess TI, GE and HP were smart to grab them when they could!
There used to be an old site that visualized the two- and three-letter domain name space as two- and three-dimensional grids. It was neat seeing the pixels fill in over time.
Two-letter .com domain names were never reserved. It was possible for anyone to register them in the very early years of the Internet (from 1985 to 1998). The first company to own an active Two Letter Domain is Hewlett-Packard. Since 1998 all permutations of the 26 × 26 = 676 .com domains have been registered and (barring the very unlikely event of a lapse in registration) they can only be obtained by buying them from the previous owner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
I remember thinking domain names were for people who "really knew what they were doing" and then was pissed I didn't register one before NetSol started charging (IIRC there was a big outcry because Kraft foods registered like 137 domains right before they started charging).
Numbers are not letters, but you're right, that's the correct number of possible two-character .com domains.
I waited for .Web I think for now close or over a decade? And it doesn't seems to be coming despite all the silly Tld we have now.
NORDUnet is a collaboration between the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) of the five Nordic countries; Denmark (DeIC), Iceland (RHnet), Norway (UNINETT), Sweden (SUNET), and Finland (Funet). The Nordic region (five countries and three autonomous areas) has a population of 25 million, 9 official languages, and a strong tradition of collaboration. Together, the countries form the world’s 11th largest economy.
NORDUnet was founded in 1985 as a result of the NORDUNET programme and is jointly owned by the five Nordic countries. Each of the Nordic NRENs has a seat on the board and share the base costs according to the country GDP.
NORDUnet operates a world-class network and e-infrastructure service for the Nordic R&E community. The five NRENs develop and operate the national research network infrastructures, connecting more than 400 research & education institutions with more than 1.2 million users.
My first domain registered was "Creation Date: 1994-06-01T04:00:00Z", and it was a total pain in the ass, involving certified letters and other nonsense.
EDIT: I assumed these were all open to anyone as they are today, thereby the number of .coms indicated higher demand/desirability. Seems that .net (and maybe .org as well) used to be restricted, which is what led to their slower pace of registrations. Makes more sense in that context.