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invalidusernam3

Top 20:

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

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Sad to see the current state of http://symbolics.com/ with a big "as seen on" section and all those social sharing buttons. It's like updating a historical center with shag carpeting and lava lamps.

The fourth IETF proceedings (back when the Internet Engineering Task Force was an internet engineering task force) contains a list of the 143 second-level domains registered as of July 10, 1986.

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.

Speaking of DEC.com, it was purchased for $57,500 few years ago by Paul Kocher. I'd say it was a bargain, considering the rich heritage of DEC and it's alexa ranking.

It makes me wonder why would Compaq / HP, or whoever was owner of DEC at the time, have let this valuable asset go for so little...

Whoever owns the trademark can file a trademark dispute and get the domain back for "cheap".

just like hydrox cookies

Yahoo began liquidating a bunch of old domains back in ~2013 (eg AV.com, formerly owned by AltaVista; Sled.com; and Sandwich.com for $137k, formerly owned by Broadcast.com, among hundreds of others), HP might have been doing something similar. Sweeping out the closet. $57k for a solid three letter domain with history certainly does seem cheap. I wonder what Musk paid for X.com, to get it from PayPal (surely seven figures).

How valuable was it really to HP/HPE? It's a domain name for a long-gone computer company. It's not like HPE has a big business in legacy DEC gear.

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.

Why would it have a high Alexa rating. Seems suspicious.

Funny that the 20th domain ever registered had a hyphen in it (bell-atl.com). They probably thought it would be easier to read than bellatl.com or bellatlantic.com

Maybe they saw domains as variables: don't use more than 8 characters ?

or MS-DOS 8.3 filenames ?

I think we just took symbolics.com down. Doesn't load right now for me, i'm wondering how much traffic it normally sees.

The remains of real Symbolics are here [1].

[1] http://www.symbolics-dks.com/

Blimey. That is some early 90s web chic going on there, and it's odd that I still find it somewhat appealing.

Same here. We might have took down the old feller.

northrop.com should’ve been kept and redirected to http://northropgrumman.com

gmr.com whois - General Motors Research & Development Center of General Motors Research & Development Center since 2017. Gmr was registered with Network Solutions LLC. on May 08, 1986. General Motors Research & Development Center resides in WARREN, USA and their email is rpresby@mail.com.

They could’ve just pointed it to http://gm.com

It doesn't surprise me that Northrop were early into domain registration, they always were an unconventional-thinking company.

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 )

Think.com was owned by Oracle for a long time.

I always forget that dashes are allowed in domain names.

Did it have any relationship to proto-digital-agency THINK New Ideas? I remember them from the 90's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation

I assumed it was going to be ThinkPad related. IBM or Lenovo should have snapped it up

"Think" was an actual IBM slogan well before ThinkPads. [0] (Which is also the reason behind Apple's "Think Different"). I guess the idea of using slogans as effective domain names wasn't as popular as today.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(IBM)

are single letter domains not allowed? surprised two letter domains are not more common.

x.com, but maybe it's not one of the oldest

There's x.org as well - the Open Group. But it wasn't registered until 1997.

Except that x.org was one of the single-letter domains grandfathered in 1993.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...

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.

There's also single-character punycode domains, e.g. ¢.com which converts to http://xn--8a.com

Single letters are allocated to "root" DNS servers.

I built this a while back:

https://linkpeek.com/blog/website-screenshot-of-every-two-le...

https://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-...

the irony of think.com being a dead end street is strong.

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