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Oldest Domain Names

domainholdings.com

54 pointspjvds64 comments

http://symbolics.com/ is just absolutely absurd now. Audi and Atari advertising next to a work from home scam, a domain name lawyer, a religious university, and a smattering of other random entities.

Somewhat ironically the first domain now just reflects the absolute nature of of the web itself.

What bothers you about that exactly?

(I know the owner of that domain and he's actually a nice honorable guy).

He paid for it in order to have the first (per my other comment) domain. What do you think should happen a plaque be put on it as is done with important physical real estate?

"Domain names have been actually been available for 28 years – yes, before you even knew what a computer looked like."

Guess I'm not part of domainholdings's target audience. I've been programming computers for 33 years. So no, not before I even knew what a computer looked like.

But man, how much money would I have, had I snapped up as many www.<fortune500companyname>.com domains as I could, and sold them to the companies as they became internet-aware!

I was thinking about this too, and I'm guessing that dumb 20 year old me would have sold those domains in the late 90's for thousands thinking I was making a huge profit instead of waiting a few more years until those Coca Cola people got desperate.

You probably would have made zero money as the companies would have filed a trademark / wipo dispute and taken the domains.

I would have registered a bunch of generic domains, like business.com or sex.com (lookup the history of that domain for an interesting read.)

A lot of people did exactly this!

Unless your last name is nissan: http://www.nissan.com

I get continually reminded of this when people see that I registered play.org as late as mid-1994. It was still free, and a substantial number of English words were still available. I'm often reminded by others that I could have also registered play.com or other common words.

Of course, much of the culture back then was: I only need one domain. This one was for my personal site, so obviously, it shouldn't be .com domain...

No regrets, though: I wouldn't want to be the type of person that looks for "under-utilized resources" to exploit. There are far more interesting things in life than that for me.

Wait, every single name here is a .com. I thought the Internet was non-commercial at first -- where are the .edu, .org, etc.? Did those not come until later, or is this list restricted?

Those can be found here:

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

> The web site for NORDUNet, nordu.net, is the oldest active domain name. It was registered on January 1, 1985.

Going from memory, but I think the 3-letter TLDs came later, all at once. I'm pretty sure the nation codes (2 letters) preceded them.

The list is incomplete. Andrew McDowell at University College London had ucl.ac.uk actually operational in June 1985. UCL was also running .uk

http://domainincite.com/2657-was-this-the-first-ever-uk-doma... (see expecially the comments)

I had no clue domains were available before I was born... that's quite a strange thought. For some reason, I was thinking they wouldn't have been around before the web.

A dumb question, but what exactly would you do with a domain name before 1990? Email is all I can think of.

The web is just port 80 (& 443). There are 65533 other ports out there, not to speak of whole other protocols such as UDP - what are they used for?

Just look at the first dozen or so lines of /etc/services and you'll get a very good picture of what services were important in the early Internet.

"The web is just port 80"

That's actually a really good important point.

Most people wrongly equate a domain not having a web page at port 80 with "it's not being used".

email, file transfers, netnews (usenet). X-Windows and Andrew started mid-1980s. AFS relied on DNS to figure out where cellservers were. Gopher started 1989-1990. ftp was in wide use. There was a lot of activity on the Internet well before the web started. Tiny compared to today of course.

Seeing Adobe as one of the oldest domain names is disappointing. They were perfectly positioned to take advantage of the growth of they internet, but were never able to capitalize. The company has really stagnated in the past 15 years.

huh? From where I'm sitting adobe looks strong as fuck. Advertising, analytics, publishing. They don't have CRM (yet), but it seems like a very strong b2b company to me.

What was registering a domain name like in 1986-87?

I'm going to guess expensive and full of paperwork.

Expensive? Domains were free up until at least 1995.

Oh really? I had no idea.

They were free, and only took a letter (not email...) to the internic. I remember when we registered Autodesk.com, not much impact at the time because we didn't have a connection to the 'net yet. My email was still {gatech,uunet,MIT}!acad!eric.

I registered one via a phone call in 1994. It was just one guy doing them all.

How many of these have been in continuous ownership since first being registered? I'm sure quite a few of them have, but I'd be curious. (For example, I'd have a hard time believing that "Marble.com" is the same entity today that it was 30 years ago, and WhoIs info goes back only so far).

Interesting question. I'm relatively certain that cayman.com, for example, was Cayman Systems, so that has obviously turned over. But many of these companies (and thus, domains) have simply been acquired. SCO.com was SCO who was once a legitimate company. kai.com was Kuck and Associates, acquired by Intel's compiler group several years ago.

The big surprise to me is that they're not all just tech companies. In a sea of domain names that built the internet sits... Alcoa!?

"The big surprise to me is that they're not all just tech companies. In a sea of domain names that built the internet sits... Alcoa!?"

Yeah, Alcoa is an interesting case. On the surface, one wonders why an aluminum manufacturer would be on the early domains list. But Alcoa has been (and still is?) in the fabrication business for a wide range of industrial uses: aerospace, defense, etc. Since the early internet was largely subsidized by the military-industrial complex, it makes some sense that a major supplier would be early on the bandwagon.

That's just a guess, though. I have no particular knowledge of why Alcoa was there early.

If your business feeds a global commodities market, then you're probably going to want some advanced telecoms to keep up with pricing, supply chains, and all those mines and processing plants in far flung corners of the globe.

Wow. Just at a glance, three minicomputer companies that have since vanished: DEC, DG, Prime. On the UNIX side, Sun and SCO, for mainframes Amdahl.

But I remember well downloading stuff from gatekeeper.dec.com.

> But I remember well downloading stuff from gatekeeper.dec.com.

Wow, you just gave my flashbacks... metalab, sunsite, ftp.cdrom.com, ...

And not sure why this one just popped into my mind as it's totally unrelated to any of those: the Internet Oracle http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/index.cgi

It's curious to note that the very first domain registration on any gTLD came from NORDUnet [1], precisely at the first day after the public launching of the Domain Name System, back in Jan 1, 1985. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORDUnet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...

Why are there so many of them that share dates of registration?

Probably because Jon Postal batched up requests and entered them all at the same time, rather than entering them as soon as the requests came in.

If I recall you used to have to fax a form in on company letterhead to confirm your domain registration.

You had to have an actual server providing services for that domain as well - and back then, that meant at least one physical machine per domain.

Why was stargate.com registered in August 5, 1986, and what was that for? The movie and show didn't come out for another 9-10 years.

But the videogame had been out for five. Who knows?

It's a pretty common sci-fi term and books have been named it as early as 1958. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_(disambiguation)?1=1

The most notable use that comes to mind for me is that in the 2001: A Space Odyssey book the monolith around Saturn is called a stargate.

Stargate was a datacenter company, bought by MDH a few years ago and is now owned by Latisys. The domain name has been passed along.

Try 1981.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_%28video_game%29

This is actually correct only for .com. There are other extensions with old "domain names" (Like .edu .org .mil etc.)

For example berkeley.edu dates to 1985 as does harvard.edu, mit.edu etc.

Domain Name: BERKELEY.EDU

   Registrar: EDUCAUSE

   Whois Server: whois.educause.net

   Referral URL: http://www.educause.edu/edudomain

   Name Server: ADNS1.BERKELEY.EDU

   Name Server: ADNS2.BERKELEY.EDU

   Name Server: AODNS1.BERKELEY.EDU

   Name Server: AODNS2.BERKELEY.EDU

   Name Server: NS.V6.BERKELEY.EDU

   Name Server: PHLOEM.UOREGON.EDU

   Name Server: SNS-PB.ISC.ORG

   Status: ok

   Updated Date: 28-may-2013

   Creation Date: 24-apr-1985

   Expiration Date: 24-apr-2014

Additionally, the list doesn't take into account that if a domain is deleted and re-registered the creation date reflects the re-registration date.

So a domain registered at the start (say http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt by Jon Postel) that was dropped and re-registered would reflect the newer date.

So this is more accurately "100 Oldest continuously registered .com domain names". (Note it also doesn't take into account ownership changes)

> Domain names were free until 1995.

Is this really true? My memory says differently, as I remember being in college 1993/1994 and having discussions about the economics of speculatively purchasing domain names. And the economics were certainly not "free".

But I don't have a source I can site.

It's funny how Bell Atlantic has the 20th oldest domain name ... and they put a hyphen in it.

Where domain names case sensitive then? Names such as "Bell-ATL.com" are listed which use capitals as they please. Is this just so we can recognize the company name more easily or are they actually registered like that?

No, domain names have always been case-insensitive, just like e-mail addresses.

E-mail addresses are case sensitive.

The domain-name part of an email address is case-insensitive.

Theoretically, this could be true. Are there any email systems that are actually case-sensitive?

Yes, a lot of older systems (non-Unix) were case sensitive.

I'm going to guess Notes was one of them, but do you have any specific examples? (Unix™-derived e-mail systems being case-insensitive (although, I'd wager that /bin/mail was case-sensitive back in 7th Edition) is obvious, and I just checked our Exchange here on campus and it, too, cares not about the case of my recipient address.)

RFC 822 calls for the "local-part" to be case-preserved. It also specifies that the special address, "Postmaster", must be deliverable with any combination of case used. I do see, however, that RFC 5321 not only reinforces the idea that the case of the "local-part" must be preserved, but it explicitly declares that "smith" and "Smith" may very well be different recipient mailboxes, which is brain-damaged, given that those are very often typed in by fallible humans.

And #45, "Data IO.com", seems to have a space in the middle.

No Microsoft.com? Late to the party?

Indeed, interesting to known why. The domain came online at May 2, 1991.

Microsoft have always been followers, not leaders. The Internet was just a curiosity, of interest mainly to academics before the early 90s.

They were late to the internet party all around. But when they did decide to get on the ball they put a lot of the leaders out of business by finally putting the TCP/IP stack in the OS. Which really was a good idea in the early 90s.

Microsoft took quite a while to start paying attention to this hippie / academic Internet thing. They were pretty late to the party.

Of course, when they decided to release "Internet Explorer for Unix" (IIRC, for SunOS and HPUX) in about 1997, coming late didn't prevent them from marketing it with a widely ridiculed phrase along the lines of "Bringing the Internet to Unix".

Interesting that think.com is owned by Oracle instead of IBM

When IBM "woke up" to the Internet in 1990, think.com was registered by Thinking Machines. When TM folded in 1994(?) we (IBM) were still just getting an Internet group together and I don't think it occurred to any of us to grab think.com (if it was even available).

think.com used to be Thinking Machines. When they folded, their data-mining software business was sold off to Oracle, along with the domain:

http://www.informationweek.com/oracle-buys-data-mining-techn...

The Domain Industry needs an enema. I would like to see all those old free domains, that aren't trademarks, or being used actively raffled off--and not to the highest bidder. Just an old fashioned raffle to anyone who owns a website.

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