The oldest .com domain names | Hacker News Reader

The oldest .com domain names

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43 pointsamdixon38 comments

This is more accurately the 100 oldest .com domains - Wikipedia's list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_re...) includes the list for the other TLDs. For example, it looks like 5 .edu domains were added at the same time as bbn.com was on April 24, 1985.

Even that list is incomplete, as it misses the country-code domains. For example, ucl.ac.uk was in DNS sometime in mid 1985 (http://domainincite.com/2657-was-this-the-first-ever-uk-doma...) But DNS registration wasn't the beginning of domain names - before DNS there was hosts.txt and some "new-style" domain names found their way in there before DNS.

This document ftp://ftp.maths.tcd.ie/src/mail/mmdf-Maths/doc/auth.ps from April 1985 by Steve Kille at UCL includes a server log (page 5) that lists hosts in cambridge.ac.uk, rsre.ac.uk, ukc.ac.uk, and rutherford.ac.uk in use all before the domain names were registered in DNS.

Disclaimer: I've had the same cs.ucl.ac.uk email address since I was a student in Sept 1985. Now I'm feeling old.

True. It looks like nordu.net is the oldest active domain having been registered on January 1, 1985 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORDUnet#Distinction

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

:grouchface:

Oh you mean 2 years after I taught myself to program on a Commodore 64 hooked up to a black and white TV in my bedroom? #getoffmylawn

It's a bit of #geoffmylawn brag but it was a much smaller community back then.

Looking at those names: I was over at #1 Symbolics quite a bit in those days (a bunch of people from the lab started the company). #3 Thinking Machines was started by my housemate Danny Hillis (I was there quite a bit visiting friends as well). I actually worked for #4 MCC and #7 Xerox (PARC in my case). I started Cygnus with John Gilmore (#84 Toad) who was previously the first employee at #12 Sun (where other founder Tiemann had also worked).

Many of the other companies on that list hold fond memories as well. Amazing!

At 35 I'm not sure I qualify for greybeard status (perhaps relatively), but when you write something like this is there some illusion that everyone reading a tech piece is under 25?

Even that wouldn't make sense here, because then it would be "before you were born" rather than "before you knew...".

I'd hope that anyone writing about tech would be aware of the significance of the C64, Apple IIe, etc.

You had a Commodore 64 ?

Kids these days...

I'm afraid to admit I was an Apple ][ snob when the C64 came out although secretly I envied some of the C64's capabilities.

It was great. I learned how to program AND compose on it. 3 voice SID chip. I later even got a MIDI cartridge for it.

Definitely check out the rather weird site at the oldest domain name in the list: http://symbolics.com/

Unfortunately the original was much more hacker friendly and awesome. Lisp Machines! They sold it off several years ago and now live here: http://www.symbolics-dks.com/

And that site is downright embarrassing. It reminds me of the way a very different but still excellent kind of older software, Delphi, went after it lost steam and was sold off by Borland: it went to people who milked it for all it was worth while putting as little into it as possible.

my "awesome" referenced more of the product they were selling than the website they were/are running. But yes, they lost to Unix / AI winter and all the money dried up.

Apparently the company sold it to some guy. Here is the story - http://symbolics.com/about-symbolics/

Can't comment on how true it is.

Wonder how much he paid for it.

I have a 50 Mbps connection. After 1 minute and 10 seconds, it has loaded 3.6 MB and is still displaying a white spinning wheel on a beautiful blue background. Amazing.

Disappointed that the oldest site ever can hire a decent frontend guy, slow and buggy on chrome on my mbp.

It is not the oldest site, just the oldest .com domain.

Basically all the early ones were Lisp companies:

* Symbolics, Lisp Machines

* BBN, Jericho Lisp Machine running Interlisp, lot's of applied AI stuff - BBN also did a lot of other things

* Thinking Machines, Lisp on the Connection Machine

MCC, Research Center with a hundred Lisp Machines used for research in AI (Cyc), chip design, object oriented databases (ORION), ...

* Xerox: Lisp Machine

* SRI: AI research

Given that this list spans a little over two years, I'm surprised to see no microsoft.com, all the other tech giants at the time are pretty much in here.

Well, people say Microsoft didn't think internet was a big deal back on the day.

Maybe busy with their IPO?

PS: microsoft.com was registered May 02, 1991

Why does #45 have a space in it? "Data IO.com" If you look up dataio.com, it says the creation date is October 10, 1997:

http://who.is/whois/dataIO.com

I assume this is a typo? Or could domains have spaces in them back then?

EDIT: I see from the wikipedia page it is actually "data-io.com"

Creation dates are from the most recent domain creation record, and can be reset from a domain ownership transfer. I lost my precious domain creation date of September 1993 when I transfered my domain from the ISP who registered it /in their own name/ (argh) to my own ownership in 1998.

wow, 1993 - what domain?

A shame to see think.com redirecting to http://www.oracle.com/splash/thinkquest/down-189973.html, which is broken by the way.

think.com is a great domain name...

Glad to see we (HP) have a pretty old one and we have DEC as well, I'm guessing we're the biggest holder of class A addresses. Now we're splitting so it'll be interesting to see how that gets distributed.

There are some real gems in there. mentat.com and then there's entity.com a resume of sorts for Marty Connor who is now apparently the Corporate Operations Engineer at Google.

Pretty interesting. Number 49 (Tandy), brings back some nostalgia. Tandy was the first computer I had growing up and the first machine I learn to program on.

I have to appreciate that I never stood a chance of getting the .com domain of my last name. It is #6 on the list.

Symptomatic Microsoft's domain is not on this list. Looks like they missed the internet revolution.

Yes, famously. Bill Gates sent his "Internet Tidal Wave" memo in 1995 and admitted they were behind:

  Some competitors have a much deeper involvement in the Internet than
  Microsoft. All UNIX vendors are benefiting from the Internet since the
  default server is still a UNIX box and not Windows NT, particularly for
  high end demands, SUN has exploited this quite effectively.
  [...]
  Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats. After 10
  hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows
  .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format.
  [...]
  A new competitor “born” on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is
  dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network
  extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where
  they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating
  system.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/al...

I find adobe.com really interesting. What were they doing back then?

> I find adobe.com really interesting. What were they doing back then?

Adobe was founded by ex-Xerox PARC employees, so perhaps not surprisingly their first couple of successes were printing related: PostScript and Type 1 fonts in 1982 and 1984, respectively. By 1986 they were working in desktop publishing with the development of Illustrator.

Prepress industry was an early adopter for the internet. Not that surprising that Adobe, whose postscript format as fundamental to that shift to electronic transmission of printable artifacts, were early to the net.

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

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