25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands | Hacker News Reader

25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands

techcrunch.com

37 pointsvaksel10 comments

A small part of me just died...

Well... It wasn't like Symbolics would start making Lisp machines again anyway, so, maybe it was time to give up the domain.

I thought the person who wrote the article said it well:

"To quote Samwise Gamgee in Lord Of The Rings: 'I don’t know why, but it makes me sad.'"

> It wasn't like Symbolics would start making Lisp machines again anyway, [...]

Sad as it is, but the demise of Lisp machines is a Good Thing. We are now so good in compiling functional programming languages on stock hardware, that special architecture is no longer needed.

For another example the "International Conference on Functional Programming" (ICFP) replaced the Conference on "Functional Programming and Computer Architecture" (FPCA).

> bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com and northrop.com

I worked in a startup (OpenMarket) that moved into Think's old office space. I was offered a job from DEC when I graduated college. I worked with Tom Knight from Symbolics when I was at Permabit, I've had lunch with Dan Weinreb of Symbolics, etc., etc., etc.

Working in or around Cambridge, MA puts you on historical ground ... and not just Paul Revere's Ride, and the battle of Lexington and Concord, and all that!

Two questions come into my mind after this article:

- Will we still use domain names in 25 years? - How will addressing "things" look like in the future?

Your thoughts?

- Will we still use domain names in 25 years?

I'd argue end-users barely use them anymore now. More and more the trend is to treat the gunk in the browser's location bar as an opaque blob. Navigation is done by searching, bookmarking, and clicking on links - not by typing domain names, which barely seem to need to exist anymore except as an implementation detail.

- How will addressing "things" look like in the future?

I'd bet on more and better kinds of search, and less having to remember stuff.

I'd argue end-users barely use them anymore now.

And you'd get no argument from me.

I don't think enough people have come to terms with the fact that for the average Internet user, Google is the Internet.

In Tokyo I can't remember the last time I saw a print ad in a public space that had an actual URL. Increasingly what you see instead is a stylized image of a search box (pixelated white box with a magnifying glass button on the side and a mouse or hand icon touching it) with some phrase inside the box indicating this is what you should search for to find more information about the ad. Amazingly the search term is usually so brief and general that I wonder if Yahoo Japan is selling the right to appear as the top search result to the advertisers.

Wonder no more: Yahoo Japan sells exactly that. So does Yahoo US: it is called "paid inclusion", and is sort of a dirty secret.

In my experience though, while the search terms are brief, they are usually not general, because they use Japanese other than what would naturally type to describe the product. For example, a tagline on a JR ad on the train today worked for me: "We can recommend you good lodgings. Just search for JR good lodgings." However, just like "good lodgings" is a little bit forced in American English, いい宿 is a little forced in Japanese.

Another favorite is making up a word in katakana. If you make up a word, you're going to own the search engine results for it by default. (Hint: works great for ideavirii. Think O'Reilly regrets "Web 2.0" one bit?)

I wonder how much it went for?

Also, a friend of mine once bought and sold bank.com possibly at the height of the boom - though he won't say how much for.

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