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Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs
- ghaff 8y agoI wonder what the story is behind nordu.net being the first registered domain name (I'm assuming it's the same nordu.net that exists today; I don't actually know although the dates seem to match up.) It is associated with research networks but it still seems a bit odd that they registered before BBN, Berkeley, and organizations like those.
- kpil 8y agoIf i remember correctly, they created the first transatlantic ARPA link in the first years of proto-internet, so they were there from the beginning, ie before DNS. Maybe they just stared to use DNS earlier than Berkeley. They had a rather respectful network in 1993, they probably had been running for more than 15 years by then.
- ghaff 8y agoYou learn something new every day. I actually had to look them up. It appears that they're unique in having registered a domain name on the same day that DARPA registered the TLDs. ADDED: I do wonder if the date is fudged a bit. I suppose it's possible that both DARPA and Nordic network people were hard at work registering things on New Year's Day but I have my doubts :-)
- bobmagoo 8y agoThat's really interesting data! I threw up a quick viz of the data: https://public.tableau.com/profile/braxtone7168#!/vizhome/Earliest100Domains/Earliest100RegisteredDomainsbyTLD https://public.tableau.com/profile/braxtone7168#!/vizhome/Ea...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- joeblau 8y agoI worked for bbn.com back in the mid 2000's before they went out of business. BBN employed some of the smartest people I've ever worked with, but the company couldn't figure out how to keep the business relationships going. I remember having a conversation with my colleague saying "How does a company that invents the internet go out of business?" I was eventually laid off along with about 30% of the company. I saw people who worked there for 18 years brought to tears because BBN was all they knew. My key take away was that experience was that no matter how impactful your tech company is on society, leadership's vision really determines the trajectory.
- macintux 8y agoI started at BBN a few years before that, a month before the sale to GTE. It was a shame, they definitely had some tremendously bright people. I also have on a couple of occasions worked at Eli Lilly, who had a class A because they were early to the Internet; I found it vaguely humorous that between BBN and Lilly I'd worked on more class A networks than most people would ever have the opportunity to.
- jacquesm 8y ago192.* and 127.* work just fine ;)
- stock_toaster 8y ago192.168.* is only a 16bit rfc-1918 allocation. Perhaps you meant 10.* ?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- MrMorden 8y agoDo you have a black rocket?
- ataturk 8y agoWorked for psi.net briefly. Ran on to grad school pretty fast. Twas a different time back then. Sort of a stupid time.
- vwcx 8y agoAnyone remember AOL Keywords?
- jwn 8y agoThis must be missing entries. For example, look up ca.com: created: 1985-01-01 Making it 2 months older than the earliest dot com on the list.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- monkeynotes 8y agoI got: ca.com > Creation Date: 1996-02-09T05:00:00Z
- jwn 8y agoWell that's strange. The company was founded in 1976, so it was certainly plausible that they would be an early domain registration, but 1996 wouldn't qualify as that! I wonder why you got a different date back?
- oaiey 8y agoI am surprised by the number of funny/visionary domains. Broken.net, super.org or portal.com as part of these lists is funny.
- arglebarnacle 8y agoIn the sea of dead links, early tech companies, think tanks, and so on, I was happy to see my local (Boston) PBS and NPR affiliate, WGBH. I don't usually think of public broadcasting as an early tech adopter, so even in Boston it was a pleasant surprise to see they registered one of the first 100 .org domains.
- ksec 8y agoGiven how many people / media say we are entering an App world, are domain name still worth a lot of money? I waited for .Web I think for now close or over a decade? And it doesn't seems to be coming despite all the silly Tld we have now.
- techwizrd 8y agoMy employer, MITRE, is known for being the first to register a .org TLD. It's a pretty neat bit of computing history.
- fl0wenol 8y agoWhy hello there, I was just about to point out the same fact.
- technofiend 8y agoAnecdotally they also chased after a consultancy using mitre.com and forced them to give up their domain. The founders had gone to MIT and Rice University and were in a completely different sector but MITRE didn't care.
- panzagl 8y agoMITRE's not really a consultancy, but I wouldn't call them a completely unrelated field. Mitre.com now belongs to the soccer ball company so they couldn't have been too tight-fisted with it.
- jcurbo 8y agoFormer employee, but I was thinking the same thing when I saw the story.
- VectorLock 8y agoBack when .net domains were actually networks. And seeing fidonet.org brought back a wave of nostalgia.
- reaperducer 8y agoShould also include an .edu list. IIRC, rice.edu was the 8th domain registered on the entire internet.
- cozzyd 8y agoWikipedia seems to have it [0]. Sad to say, looks like Cal beat Stanford :( [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names#.edu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...
- kps 8y agoI don't believe Wikipedia. The fourth IETF proceedings lists 90 .edu domains registered as of July 10, 1986. Of those, 18 are still currently registered but are not in Wikipedia's list: buffalo.edu colgate.edu du.edu houston.edu lehigh.edu merit.edu mosis.edu riacs.edu sdsu.edu sunysb.edu tmc.edu ucar.edu uchicago.edu uiowa.edu umb.edu uoregon.edu villanova.edu vt.edu A further 7 are no longer registered: mich-state.edu ntsu.edu ogc.edu pittsburgh.edu ukans.edu wanginst.edu waterloo.edu
- cozzyd 8y agoYeah, it must be based on querying whois, but for example, whois shows that uchicago.edu was registered in 1991 and northwestern.edu was registered in 1999 (!!). I suppose there may have been some lapse in the registration or something...
- seandougall 8y agoNorthwestern used to be nwu.edu, but they rebranded in 1999 (which happened to be my sophomore year there).
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI'm surprised utah.edu is so far down the list, considering the early history of ARPANET. (Well, at least we beat byu.edu, if only barely.)
- rconti 8y agoLots of business and org names are acronyms, but it really stands out to me how most of the early ones are short. I guess in the age of excessively-long UUCP addresses, it was immediately obvious that short domain names would be preferable to longer ones.
- king_nothing 8y agoOMG. I remember those foo!blah!whatever!hey!someonesslowandunreliableboxwithoutanups!mineallmine Thank the flying spaghetti monster for SMTP.
- sillysaurus3 8y agoIt's a deeper reason than that. Humans are hardwired to start with short symbols. Picture a group of humans who evolve a new language. That language will likely start with short sounds, and then progressively build up to longer sounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE Anyone who hasn't read A Mathematical Theory of Communication, you're missing out. It's quite readable and quite cool: http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...
- smhenderson 8y agoThe two letter domain names really stuck out to me. I had a boss ask me back in the early 2000's to register a two letter domain and I was surprised to find that Network Solutions would no longer do that. I didn't spend much time on it so maybe another registrar would but as far as I can remember two letter domains just weren't an option at the point. I guess TI, GE and HP were smart to grab them when they could!
- invalidusernam3 8y agoCrazy to think the oldest domain is 12 days older than me (registered 1985-03-15)
- king_nothing 8y agoThe oldest domain is still going strong http://nordu.net http://nordu.net NORDUnet is a collaboration between the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) of the five Nordic countries; Denmark (DeIC), Iceland (RHnet), Norway (UNINETT), Sweden (SUNET), and Finland (Funet). The Nordic region (five countries and three autonomous areas) has a population of 25 million, 9 official languages, and a strong tradition of collaboration. Together, the countries form the world’s 11th largest economy. NORDUnet was founded in 1985 as a result of the NORDUNET programme and is jointly owned by the five Nordic countries. Each of the Nordic NRENs has a seat on the board and share the base costs according to the country GDP. NORDUnet operates a world-class network and e-infrastructure service for the Nordic R&E community. The five NRENs develop and operate the national research network infrastructures, connecting more than 400 research & education institutions with more than 1.2 million users.
- pishpash 8y ago.net (and .org) used to have more cachet, interesting how these things evolve.
- walshemj 8y ago.net defiantly as it was originally only for players in the industry .org was always more open.
- ianmcgowan 8y ago.edu also. I remember when having .com in your email was looked down on. Back when getting email (via UUCP) was more exciting than getting a letter in the mail. My first domain registered was "Creation Date: 1994-06-01T04:00:00Z", and it was a total pain in the ass, involving certified letters and other nonsense.
- Infernal 8y agoHmm is that really true? According to this list the 100th .com domain was registered in November 1987, while it took .org and .net until May 1991 and April 1993, respectively, to reach their 100th registrations. It seems there was much more demand for .com right off the bat. EDIT: I assumed these were all open to anyone as they are today, thereby the number of .coms indicated higher demand/desirability. Seems that .net (and maybe .org as well) used to be restricted, which is what led to their slower pace of registrations. Makes more sense in that context.
- invalidusernam3 8y agoTop 20: symbolics.com - Still exists bbn.com - Redirects to raytheon.com think.com - Dead mcc.com - Redirects to thecryptogenius.com (sometimes, not sure what's going on with it) dec.com - Redirects to paulkocher.com northrop.com - Dead xerox.com - Alive, Xerox website sri.com - Alive hp.com - Alive, HP website bellcore.com - Dead ibm.com - Alive, IBM website sun.com - Alive, sun website (oracle.com) intel.com - Alive, intel website ti.com - Alive, Texas Instruments att.com - Alive, ATT gmr.com - Dead tek.com - Alive, Tektronix website fmc.com - Alive, FMC website ub.com - Alive, United Bitcoin website bell-atl.com - Dead
- russellbeattie 8y agoThink.com was owned by Oracle for a long time. I always forget that dashes are allowed in domain names.
- CPLX 8y agoDid it have any relationship to proto-digital-agency THINK New Ideas? I remember them from the 90's.
- kps 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation
- roryisok 8y agoI assumed it was going to be ThinkPad related. IBM or Lenovo should have snapped it up
- lou1306 8y ago"Think" was an actual IBM slogan well before ThinkPads. [0] (Which is also the reason behind Apple's "Think Different"). I guess the idea of using slogans as effective domain names wasn't as popular as today. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(IBM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(IBM)
- everdev 8y agoWere original registrations done by mail? I see 5 domains registered on Aug. 5th, 1986, then no more domains for another month. And 12 on Dec. 11 1986, then again another month with no registrations.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ci5er 8y agoI think you could do online+fax-followup from sometime around 93 or 94, but until then: mail. Even then online was dodgy (unreliable) at best. Easier to call ISI and see how they wanted it this year... EDIT: I operated a regional thing off BBN, and I could do the nasty bits of hoisting myself to administrative acceptance. I can't imagine what it must have required for someone just trying to 'join' before 1990-or-so.
- jedberg 8y agoI believe they were done by email or online form (edited to be more accurate), but were all verified by a human and entered into the database manually. So you had to wait for the processing run to get your domain in, which was at the whims of the person who had to process them.
- FactolSarin 8y agoYup, they sure were.
- 8y ago
- chrisacky 8y agoWhat was registration fees back then? Why wouldn't people just squat on a bunch of two/three letter domains? Was it prohibitively difficult to register..
- mark-r 8y agoI have two forward-thinking friends who grabbed their initials, so they have 3-letter .com domain names.
- ant6n 8y agoNobody saw a value in domain names. People didn't think we'd run out of domains. People didn't think that the internet would become mainstream, or that it would continue to exist in that form for a long time.
- ci5er 8y agoPaul Allen sued me (us) to claw interval.net back in early 1995...
- ghaff 8y agoFor that matter, /8 blocks were given out, if not quite like candy, certainly with considerable abandon. A fair number of the early universities and companies who registered ended up with complete /8 blocks all to themselves. [EDIT: Duh. Of course, it was actually Class A blocks at the time.]
- falcor84 8y agoJust to nitpick, this was before CIDR, so you're probably referring to Class A blocks, of which there were only 125 (the first octet being 1-9,11-126).
- bena 8y agohttps://xkcd.com/195/ https://xkcd.com/195/ Maybe a little out of date by now, but still, you can get a feel for it. Apple, Ford, HP, DEC, Xerox, among others all have full /8 blocks.
- cobbzilla 8y agotrivial thing I noticed: eff.org predates fsf.org by ~3 months. must have been a fun time to be at the genesis of so much.
- triviatise 8y agoI had ign.org registered in the 1994 timeframe. Don't know why I let it lapse!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gwbas1c 8y agointel.com is there... microsoft.com isn't.
- Bromskloss 8y agoIt's funny that several of the top ones on the lists use light blue colours prominently. For a moment, I wondered if some of them had been collected and were run by a single organisation.
- lispm 8y agoFor the record: the first .com companies were mostly heavy AI/Lisp users: Symbolics -> Lisp Machines, Lisp software BBN -> Jericho Lisp Machine, BBN Lisp, various Lisp applications Thinking Machines -> Connection Machine CM1, a massive parallel accelerator for Symbolics Lisp Machine, *Lisp MCC -> had a network of 100+ Lisp Machines, developed Cyc, Orion (a Lisp OODB) and a Lisp-based CAD system - amongst others Xerox -> Interlisp, Interlisp-D Lisp Machine SRI -> AI research with lots Lisp applications
- matt_wulfeck 8y agoChecks one from the 90's: > This Site Is Under Construction and Coming Soon. I won't hold my breath!
- mc32 8y agoI had thought two letter TLDs weren’t allowed till the mid 90s... but this shows they were allowed from the beginning. Maybe I’m thinking single alphanumeric domains.
- sideproject 8y agoJust a side question... how could I have registered a domain name back in the 80's? What was the process back in those days ?
- skilic 8y agoIs there a way to check the date a specific domain was registered?
- paulstovell 8y agoWe have https://octopus.com https://octopus.com, which is on the list. And first registered the year I was born. Has an interesting history: http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/text/2011/d2011-0417.html http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/text/2011/d2011... > Respondent Yana Beklova, who at one stage worked for the Complainant, requested an amount between USD 500,000 and USD 1,000,000 for the transfer of the disputed domain name, that the registrant of the disputed domain name sought to hide its identity through a WhoIs privacy protection service, that the Respondents tried to transfer the disputed domain name out of the reach of the Australian courts to avoid legal proceedings after having received the cease and desist letter, that some of the Respondents named by the Complainant have been involved in previous UDRP proceedings, which suggests a pattern of conduct, and that the disputed domain name was registered to intentionally attract customers looking for the Complainant’s website for commercial gain by creating a likelihood of confusion.
- drchickensalad 8y agoGod I love octopus. Thank you for your work!
- TigerHimself 8y agoIs there a free and unlimited Whois query ?
- apexalpha 8y agoOn this note: in 1986 the .nl became official being the first country domain outside of the US with: www.cwi.nl
- gnufx 8y agoI'm surprised no-one has pointed out that many UK academic addresses effectively remain from the days of SRCNET/SERCNET -- I forget when it changed -- in the early '80s, and possibly late '70s. It's just that they've changed from the NRS big-endian scheme (as IP addresses) to DNS little-endian, i.e. liv.ac.uk now, instead of uk.ac.liv where I started. (There was a long and short form of most names, so uk.ac.liv and uk.ac.liverpool were equivalent.) Much confusion between, e.g., cs as computer science and Czechoslovakia in the period when both endians were allowed...