100 Oldest Domain Names and Their Current Status
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Almost all of the first registered domains were the ones registered by companies to reach out to potential clients. Registering a personal domain and setting up a personal website was not very popular at that time. Some of the companies that registered these domains were sold, some went out of business, yet some of those domains are still being used by their first registrars. In fact, it is possible to encounter some of those domains on some domain sales platforms.
One of the most interesting aspects of these domains is that some of them have not changed their homepage since day one. You may feel nostalgic on your first visit to these websites.
We have ignored some of the extensions on the list. If we were to count the domains with .edu extensions that were registered for every higher education institution during the inception of the internet, we would end up with a meaningless list of identical entries.
Overall, when we look at the ownership status of the domains, we see that 53 of them still belongs to their first owner. On the other hand, while 24 out of 47 domains have changed hands directly, 23 of them did through the acquisition of the company that owned the domain.*
What is surprising is that 5 out of the 100 hundred domains in the list are on sale as stated on domain sales platforms, as well as their respective homepages. In other words, if you are willing to pay enough money, you may own one or several of the 100 oldest domains of the history of the internet.
Those domains that are not on sale and have no public record of sales history are generally the ones used by old companies for their official websites. We may say that established technology companies like HP, Intel and IBM are among these. Additionally, we notice that some domains have been welcoming their visitors with the same homepage for quite some time and look abandoned.
See the list: https://blog.dofo.com/oldest-domain-names/