100 Oldest .Com Domains | Hacker News Reader

100 Oldest .Com Domains

whoisd.com

102 pointswhenimgone48 comments

That should really be the "100 Oldest .com Domains". Before the .com days, the internet had two top-level domains: .ARPA (for ARPANET -- universities and companies) and .MIL (for MILNET -- U.S. military). BBN was BBN.ARPA long before it was BBN.COM (they developed the original internet routing hardware).

Since the old .ARPA domains no longer exist, the oldest domains still in use today would probably be the .MIL domains (e.g., army.mil), which date back to 1983.

Wikipedia has a diagram of what the entire network looked like in 1977: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet

.arpa still exists and is used exclusively for technical infrastructure purposes. While the name originally was the acronym for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), it now stands for Address and Routing Parameter Area.

arpa contains also the domains for reverse domain name resolution in-addr.arpa and ip6.arpa for IPv4 and IPv6, respectively.

For details, see section 3.5 in RFC 1035 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt)

arpa is still published. I got a resume a few years ago from a guy who's email address was something@arpa. That's just bad ass.

Really? There's still Mailservers around for arpa? Wow. I wonder how many e-mail validators that e-mail passes...

This was around 10 years ago (which is a lot more recent than I'd expect). There's no MX or A record on arpa right now.

Just to be clear: the "domains" you're talking about aren't DNS domains in the modern sense of the world. ARPANET had its own addressing scheme. DNS arrived post-IP, and .com was one of the original TLDs (with mil, edu, net and gov).

The "inter" in "internet" designated a way to route among disparate networks.

There were many network stacks back in the 1970s and 1980s, and even into the 1990s. uucp/uucpnet. Fido. DECnet. OSI. X.25.

It wasn't at all clear which one would become the dominant technology, and (for a while in the early 1990s) it arguably ended up being between IP and OSI networking.

Back then, path routing could be explicitly required, and you needed to know about the old SMTP % email syntax, and particularly about the routes to well-known hosts. Such as decvax. You really didn't have domains, you had bang-paths.

Trivia: ftp is older than IP.

Notably absent from the list: Microsoft.com

I noticed that as well. I was kind of surprised by it. Microsoft was well on its way by 1991 when they finally registered their domain name. The only thing I can figure is that back then, no one was really thinking, "This Internet thing is going to be the center of the computing universe in 10 years." Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in 1992, just a year after their domain was registered.

Windows for Workgroups 3.1 (1992 release) was Microsoft's first operating system where the fact that the computer was intended to connect to a network was front and center. Maybe Microsoft didn't see the internet as a logical imperative at this early stage of computing.

Microsoft didn't realise how important the internet was going to be until after Windows 95 was released, and built their own online service called MSN that was comparable to AOL.

They famously made a quick u-turn after Netscape Navigator became massively popular, and Windows 98 was much more internet-focused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN#MSN_Classic

MSN was originally conceived as a dial-up online content provider like America Online, supplying proprietary content through an artificial folder-like interface integrated into Windows 95's Windows Explorer

http://www.internet-story.com/microsoft.htm

Bill Gates almost missed the opportunity provided by Internet. At one time, he even considered it to be merely a passing fad. However, once Microsoft had realised Internet’s potential, the company not only rapidly caught up but overtook its competitors

These domains are older than Microsoft.com. SCO.com was registered in 1987 while Microsoft.com wasn't registered until 91.

Microsoft had their IPO in 1986. So, they could have registered a .com (since they had been in existence for many years before then).

Great news about their IPO in 86. But it was _registered_ in 91. Vote me down for stating a fact. Maybe I'll bash a multi billion dollar company we all hate because we like to "think different" and then I'll get voted up.

blogspam? Why not the source http://www.whoisd.com/oldestcom.php

Most of them are companies, and most of the very earliest are tech companies. So looking over the list was not much of a surprise. Except for the very first one: SYMBOLICS.COM. They were a computer manufacturer, though I'd never heard of them. Sadly, going to symbolics.com revealed a "parked page" that admitted that it was a parked page looking to make money off the fact that symbolics.com was the first registered domain name.

I say sad, because I was rather hoping it was the original site, preserved in all its html 1 goodness.

EDIT - Actually, html wasn't around back then, so... I don't know. I guess I'd like to see an emulator revealing what the site used to look like.

Symbolics made Lisp machines. Great company (for some definitions of "great"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics

You know it's old when the innards look like the inside of a Nortel Meridian Option 11c PBX.

http://corporatetelecom-ca.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/image...

What I don't get is why they're the oldest domain. Even the first few nodes of the internet (BBN, SRI, etc.) were registered as domains later than symbolics.com

It is not necessary to own a domain to connect a node to the Internet. DNS wasn't introduced until 1985, and as there was no domain sharks back then, there was really no rush to register.

Edit: DNS dates from 1983, the TLDs we know today from 1985.

there was no domain sharks back then

Ah, the good ol'days.

And domains were free at that time too.

"It is not necessary to own a domain to connect a node to the Internet."

Wow, really? I've managed to pick up a few facts while writing scripts for webpages and connecting my home PC to the information superhighway for all these years, but I must have missed that one. I guess you learn something new every day! Tell me: have you seen the place where the tubes are connected? Are there lots of valves?

Ahem.

The question is: why did symbolics feel the need to register a domain long before the web, and months before any of the other major players? It seems remarkably prescient, and I'm wondering why they registered it, despite the fact that it (obviously) wasn't mandatory.

Registering a domain name was pretty important if you wanted to be able to send and receive e-mail.

Except most of the email ran on internal company systems. To email an external address took a lot of scripts to convert to x.500 or !-path addresses

In the early 90s I remember mailing copies of our /etc/hosts to other places we worked with and email often. There was no reliable central DNS

In the early 90s I remember mailing copies of our /etc/hosts to other places we worked with and email often. There was no reliable central DNS

That is pretty badass.

Why not? Symbolics originated from MIT research in the late 70s and were selling the first personal workstations in the early 80s. Their machines were connected to the Internet ever since it existed. IIRC at MIT some of the DNS tables were generated from Symbolics network namespaces at that time.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html Symbolics vs Lisp Machines Inc.

They went bancrupt before there were 'sites'. Symbolics existed mostly throughout the 80s and very early 90s.

When Symbolics was active as a company, Symbolics.com was used for email and some other purposes mostly.

Kesmai! Now there's a name I didn't expect to see that high up the list. I paid up to $10 per hour to play Air Warrior[1] against people from other countries, at least until I found a cheaper route to the much more populated US servers (cris.com?).

[1] a WW2 flight sim, one of the first MMO'ish experiences for me in the early 90's.

The fourth oldest domain on the list is MCC.COM. Anyone know what company that is?

Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_and_Computer_T...

Back in '97 it was the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. Not sure about the time before that...

http://web.archive.org/web/19970214020411/http://www.mcc.com...

Stargate.com is a peculiar one to be on the list.

Apparently this refers to Stargate Information Systems: http://www.decuslib.com/decus/vax88b3/vmsnet/suppinfo/servic...

You've got to wonder whether the term somehow inspired the movie.

And coming in at number 25: 08/05/1986 STARGATE.COM

Stargate must have been the first movie ever to get it's own .com domain? I guess it reflects the crowd they were aiming for.

Lol, just did the prerequisite research and found out the movie wasn't released till 1994. Apparently this refers to another technology manufacturer.

And here i was hoping for something to break the monotony of technology companies in the top 100.

I find http://www.dailychanges.com/top-sites/ interesting

It's fun that Symbolics would probably still be here today,if they just registered one more domain at the time.

All of them are .COM domains; is it because .NET/.EDU weren't around back then?

That list is just for .com domains. This Wikipedia entry lists old .com, .org, .edu and .net domains: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_re...

Also, I found it amusing how much overlap there is between the 50 oldest .edu domains and the US News list of top CS grad programs: http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

Universities were heavily involved in the creation of the internet/ARPANET, and IIRC, the University of Utah was the third host on the internet (in 1969 or 1970), so the list probably just omits the non-dot-com domain names.

.EDU was created at the same time as .COM, in January 1985. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu#History

Before then, universities that were on the ARPANET (those with research funded by the Defense Department) were under the .ARPA domain.

None, of course, will appear before the domain system was setup. These are for TLDs only. Arpanet came before, as well as other competing networking systems, and it was only the transition to a domain system that this history makes sense. See RFC 799 written in September 1981.

It's filtered to only contain .com. The first .se domain was registered sometime in 1986, which would definitely place it pretty high on that list.

would like to thank the author of that page for not using hyperlinks.

ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+c...

in chrome you can select the text and use "go to ..." from the context menu

a good name like octopus.com is not even hosted ditto mentat.com

Symbolics.com was bought by domain squatter XF investments in 2009... some information here about that (though price is undisclosed) http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/27/25-years-later-first-regist...

It hasn't been updated since 2003. Come back when there's an up-to-date oldest list.

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