4 ms·

Top 20: symbolics.com - Still exists bbn.com - Redirects to raytheon.com think.com - Dead mcc.com - Redirects to thecryptogenius.com (sometimes, not sure wh

• russellbeattie 8y ago
  Think.com was owned by Oracle for a long time. I always forget that dashes are allowed in domain names.
  • CPLX 8y ago
    Did it have any relationship to proto-digital-agency THINK New Ideas? I remember them from the 90's.
    • kps 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation
  • roryisok 8y ago
    I 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)
• swyx 8y ago
  are single letter domains not allowed? surprised two letter domains are not more common.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • everdev 8y ago
    x.com, but maybe it's not one of the oldest
    • smhenderson 8y ago
      There's x.org as well - the Open Group. But it wasn't registered until 1997.
      • kps 8y ago
        Except that x.org was one of the single-letter domains grandfathered in 1993.
  • cbhl 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... tl;dr: IANA reserved all the single-letter domains in 1993, except for some that had been grandfathered in. All the two-letter .com domains are registered, and only available on the secondary market.
    • chejazi 8y ago
      There's also single-character punycode domains, e.g. ¢.com which converts to http://xn--8a.com http://xn--8a.com
  • foxhop 8y ago
    Single letters are allocated to "root" DNS servers. I built this a while back: https://linkpeek.com/blog/website-screenshot-of-every-two-letter-domain.html https://linkpeek.com/blog/website-screenshot-of-every-two-le... https://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-two-letter-domain.html https://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-...
• king_nothing 8y ago
  northrop.com should’ve been kept and redirected to http://northropgrumman.com http://northropgrumman.com
  • dingaling 8y ago
    It doesn't surprise me that Northrop were early into domain registration, they always were an unconventional-thinking company. Nor does it surprise me that the post-merger leadership abandoned the domain name. I think that says a lot about their attitude ( acquire, grow, acquire )
  • king_nothing 8y ago
    gmr.com whois - General Motors Research & Development Center of General Motors Research & Development Center since 2017. Gmr was registered with Network Solutions LLC. on May 08, 1986. General Motors Research & Development Center resides in WARREN, USA and their email is rpresby@mail.com. They could’ve just pointed it to http://gm.com http://gm.com
• verelo 8y ago
  I think we just took symbolics.com down. Doesn't load right now for me, i'm wondering how much traffic it normally sees.
  • rjsw 8y ago
    The remains of real Symbolics are here [1]. [1] http://www.symbolics-dks.com/ http://www.symbolics-dks.com/
    • bartread 8y ago
      Blimey. That is some early 90s web chic going on there, and it's odd that I still find it somewhat appealing.
  • belic 8y ago
    Same here. We might have took down the old feller.
• otterpro 8y ago
  Speaking of DEC.com, it was purchased for $57,500 few years ago by Paul Kocher. I'd say it was a bargain, considering the rich heritage of DEC and it's alexa ranking.
  • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Why would it have a high Alexa rating. Seems suspicious.
  • icedchai 8y ago
    It makes me wonder why would Compaq / HP, or whoever was owner of DEC at the time, have let this valuable asset go for so little...
    • nodja 8y ago
      Whoever owns the trademark can file a trademark dispute and get the domain back for "cheap".
      • dddw 8y ago
        just like hydrox cookies
    • adventured 8y ago
      Yahoo began liquidating a bunch of old domains back in ~2013 (eg AV.com, formerly owned by AltaVista; Sled.com; and Sandwich.com for $137k, formerly owned by Broadcast.com, among hundreds of others), HP might have been doing something similar. Sweeping out the closet. $57k for a solid three letter domain with history certainly does seem cheap. I wonder what Musk paid for X.com, to get it from PayPal (surely seven figures).
    • ghaff 8y ago
      How valuable was it really to HP/HPE? It's a domain name for a long-gone computer company. It's not like HPE has a big business in legacy DEC gear. Even if someone else can wring some money out of it with ads or whatever, HPE isn't in that kind of business. Even for a big company, $60K is still $60K if you can get it for something that ha no value to you.
• everdev 8y ago
  Funny that the 20th domain ever registered had a hyphen in it (bell-atl.com). They probably thought it would be easier to read than bellatl.com or bellatlantic.com
  • johnchristopher 8y ago
    Maybe they saw domains as variables: don't use more than 8 characters ?
    • glenneroo 8y ago
      or MS-DOS 8.3 filenames ?
• everdev 8y ago
  Sad to see the current state of http://symbolics.com/ http://symbolics.com/ with a big "as seen on" section and all those social sharing buttons. It's like updating a historical center with shag carpeting and lava lamps.
• belic 8y ago
  the irony of think.com being a dead end street is strong.
• kps 8y ago
  The fourth IETF proceedings (back when the Internet Engineering Task Force was an internet engineering task force) contains a list of the 143 second-level domains registered as of July 10, 1986. Of the 40 listed .com domains, the following are not in the list in the OP article: adelie.com buck.com cca.com mecc.com nbi.com next.com olivetti.com proteon.com pyr.com rca.com tmc.com vse.com One of the five listed .org domains is not in the article: csc.org The one listed .net domain is cs.net, also not in the article.