35 years ago today: the first domain name symbolics.com was registered | Hacker News Reader

35 years ago today: the first domain name symbolics.com was registered

dofo.com

155 pointsmacittuna37 comments

RFC 882, which defined domain-style addressing, was released in 1983:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc882

There was domain-style addressing that predated domains like ".com" and ".edu". The original top-level domains were ".arpa" (for ARPANET) and ".mil" (for MILNET).

Symbolics was "symbolics.arpa" before it was "symbolics.com".

So instead of "the first domain name was registered", maybe it would be more accurate to say "the first registration of a domain name with a registry took place"?

Basically it was the first ".com" domain.

If anyone knows: How were RFCs distributed before the modern Internet as we know it existed?

I believe these were distributed via FTP from InterNIC at SRI[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterNIC

In the very early days (from RFC 3):

  DISTRIBUTION

  One copy only will be sent from the author's site to"

        1.  Bob Kahn, BB&N
        2.  Larry Roberts, ARPA
        3.  Steve Carr, UCLA
        4.  Jeff Rulifson, UTAH
        5.  Ron Stoughton, UCSB
        6.  Steve Crocker, UCLA

  Reproduction if desired may be handled locally.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3.html

Before the Internet there was Usenet and a world-wide network network of machines connected together via UUCP, doing email and such over point-to-point dialup (modem) links. Sending mail was a matter of knowing a complete path through the network from your source machine to the recipient's destination machine (and Usenet news implemented public discussion groups over this network). If I recall correctly, you could send specially formatted email messages to the server where the RFCs lived, and an autoresponder program would read your message and email back the requested RFCs.

That was still the Internet, it just wasn't the World Wide Web or modern (SMTP/POP3/IMAP) email.

No, that was a network, but it was very much not the Internet. Different technologies.

Per Wikipedia, "The Internet (portmanteau of interconnected network) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide."

The network of UUCP-connected machines (also called UUCPNET) did not use TCP/IP and had no inbuilt notion of how to get packets from one place to another. One had to specifically list a set of instructions, a path, from source to destination hosts. UUCPNET was entirely store-and-forward, and sent entire messages, not packets. And it was in wide use throughout the 80's before the Internet became a thing (which happened once researchers started interconnecting networks that used TCP/IP).

To say that UUCPNET was the Internet just without the web, is like saying that radio _is_ TV, just without the pictures.

This is quickly going to devolve into semantics, but just because the Internet today is built on TCP/IP doesn't mean that's a requirement to be considered "internet". An internet is just a WAN between LANs, and I don't think it matters what specific Layer 3/4 protocol you choose. ARPANET is widely acknowledged as the predecessor of what we today call "the Internet" and it predates TCP/IP.

Then fidonet and every other bbs network was also the internet. No.

What was the process of registering a domain name at that time? I've often dreamed about going back in time to when I was a kid and registering a bunch of domains before 1995. What would have been involved?

You sent in a text document to an email address of an actual person if I remember correctly.

Hope someone's remembered to renew it. :P

Yeah - it expires tomorrow

    Domain Name: SYMBOLICS.COM
    Registry Domain ID: 57551_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
    Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.networksolutions.com
    Registrar URL: http://networksolutions.com
    Updated Date: 2020-01-16T08:51:05Z
    Creation Date: 1985-03-15T05:00:00Z
    Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2021-03-16T04:00:00Z
    Registrar: Network Solutions, LLC

Probably renewed by an automatic system. Don't even think about it :D

This made me go look up when Musk bought x.com, turns out only 1999, thought it was older

What does he do with it? The page you get is a simple 'x' only.

I am hoping he has loads of stuff on hidden urls, and uses it for personal email or something. If he's just sitting on it doing nothing, then that's just plain wrong.

X.com was registered in 1993 but bought by Musk in 1999. He lost the domain name by leaving the Paypal but bought back the domain name from Paypal in 2017: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/884580654117076992

X.com is one of the few single-character domain names that created before IANA’s restriction of single-letter and single-digit domain names registration in December 1993.

x.com/musk has a y Or any /<something> results in a y

Is this the same Symbolics that came out of the MIT AI lab? With the LISP machines?

Yes.

Also creators of the crazy Space Cadet keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

I wish they still made keyboards like that. I'm curious to know the "feel"

The CADR space cadet had a spongy feel, probably because of the large size and plastic case. A sad dependent of the Knight TV keyboards. With the 3600 series Symbolics replaced that with a solid keyboard (fewer keys though) that was more satisfying to type on.

Some of those keys like thumbs up/down etc were never really used anyway.

As gumby says, the Space Cadet keyboards, being Microswitch Hall effect-based, were a bit spongy due to the big plastic case, but the switches themselves were dreamy.

But the whole experience was still not as satisfying as the original Knight keyboards, I suspect because the Knight boards used the original, larger switches, while the Space Cadets used the smaller. Chyrosran22 on Youtube explains all this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcdN4Vzg6_g and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDozftThFMw).

By the way, after 40 years of despairing over the loss of Hall effect switches (I nursed a Space Cadet Livermore Labs clone from a group buy for some years into the mid-80's), there are now two keyboards using this technology, and I'm loving the one that's actually available.

Steelseries Apex Pro is what's now shipping, and it's a dream. (https://www.amazon.com/SteelSeries-Apex-Mechanical-Gaming-Ke...)

The Input Club Keystone is still coming, slowly (https://kono.store/products/keystone-analog-mechanical-keybo...), but I'm also really looking forward to trying it.

I see they have convenient up/down vote keys on the righthand side of the board.

Strictly speaking, the Space Cadet keyboard was JLK's creation (John L Kulp, who ran the MIT Plasma Labs computing facilities, and who went on to help found Symbolics when they split off from the AI Lab).

I had a Space Cadet on my desk in the EECS department along with a Plasma TV system monitor.

Had fun times hacking the PDP-11 software driving the Plasma TV system.

I remember when we exchanged text files with long lists of IPs for FTP servers at the university before most servers had domain names.

I wonder what the first UUCP nodes were named.

Not sure about UUCP specifically, but a persistent problem until the introduction of DNS seems to have been that various places in the network sometimes had different names for a single host. Check out the discussion referenced from RFC 298, “What we hope is an official list of host names”: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc289.html

First-ever domain was registered in 1985. Many others were kept being registered since then. But what are the first used domains up to these days?

100 Oldest Domain Names & Their Current Status: https://dofo.com/blog/oldest-domain-names/

Thank you, interesting link. I had for a long time thought symbolics.com was the first "modern style" domain to have been registered, but it looks like it was actually nordu.net, even if the intention was to use it for a root server.

That page doesn’t seem reliable—it says various domains have been used for websites since 1986.

Yes, lots of domain names have been used since 1985-86. What's wrong here?

"websites"

I am the founder of Octopus Deploy - we have #52 on that list. It was first registered in the same year I was born!

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