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The First 100 Dot Coms Ever Registered
roman1 submitted an interesting list containing the first 100 .com domains registered. Many of the names you haven't heard of, many you have. What was interesting to me is that it took 2 years just to get 100 domains on-line.
... here is some pictures of a symbolics (those with the first domasin) machine for those who cannot imagine ...
http://home.hakuhale.net/rbc/symbolics/20041113/20041113.html
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
One of my very first introductions to enterprise networking and internet was back in about 1988. I was friends with the admin of a Vax cluster at a progressive little company. He had printed out "the host table" that he downloaded each night. It probably wasn't more than 80 or 100 sheets of fanfold greenbar. I remember browsing it a bit and the only two that I can remember were burlingtoncoatfactory.com and lucasarts.com (or was it lucasfilms?)
anyway....get off my lawn!
Yea it took two years, but these where internet connections. Most companies where not thinking about connecting there computers to the outside world unless they where doing some research or involved with networking in some way. There was not let's put out our "Marketing message on the Internet", most of it was he we where working with this in School and we could use this technology to share information or for sending email.
-S
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
The registering and selling-on of domain names in the mid-to-late 90's made some serious money for a few brave entrepreneurs. sex.com is the classic case, although early domain-name squatting on big business names brought in easy bucks for some.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
1985, first domain. I'm fairly sure a few posting here weren't even born, most of the rest had other things on their mind than DNS problems (my main concerns was that I was going to a different school then and had to find new friends).
The internet was but a dream. It was something that a few research companies, some universities and maybe even the ARPA cared about. Nobody had internet at home. If anything, we had modems to dial into BBSs.
Does it make sense to register a COM domain? As in Commercial?
Some companies realized that this will be the future (and I'm honestly surprised to see Siemens on the list, they must've had better and more visionary people in their upper echelons back then), and they registered their trademark as a com domain rather than fighting a lengthy battle with domain grabbers as many have done later. Cisco and a few others on the list make sense, since they are pretty tightly coupled with the success of the internet, being more or less networking companies.
But, bluntly, why should any flower shop or manufacturer of beer bottles register "his" domain in the 80s? It was hardly their topic, and hardly any sensible way to sell their goods without an audience willing and able to buy via the net.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No ASCIIPORN.COM?
I wonder when Microsoft finally got on board? Damn, I shoulda squatted!!!
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
Wow, Symbolics was ahead of the curve. Too bad their hardware cost and arm and a leg.
I don't remember the fist web site I visited - but I remember it was using Lynx. I used gopher all the time, though. Turbogopher ran a lot better on the Mac LC3s at the University computer lab than the pre-beta of Mosaic.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I'm sure when the net was young that .orgs had to be non profit, and .nets were ISPs, but all of that seems to have totally disappeared. I also think its a bit sad that we have .co.uk and so on, but nobody used any .us or .usa names. .com became the default URL that you had to have, with everything else being cheap and forgettable. People can tell my site is UK site and that I'm a UK company, but US companies are completely invisible, with the rush for everyone to be dotcom. I'm sure a lot of UK customers are automatically pleasantly disposed towards my company when they realise I'm a bit 'local' to them, but the same thing isn't an option in the US.
Given the ubiquity of bookmarks, hyperlinks and google, do we even need catchy domain names any more? I might have paid over the odds many years ago to get an easily remembered one, but now? who cares, people will find you with google anyway right?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
MS doesn't buy. MS litigates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wow 2 years and not one person thought to register a porn site?
What am I thinking.. it's 1987.. ASCII porn never really caught on.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Just curious, anyone know how much it cost to register a domain back at the beginning?
This 'first 100 .com' stuff is all nice and dandy, but what I want to see is the LAST one hundred .com domains.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Wow, the man that "invented" the Internet didn't have one of the first 100? Go figure!
Excerpt from checklist for when I get my time machine working:
.COM domain names consisting of 2 and 3 letters.
#10: Visit 1985 and buy up all 18,252
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
1985 -- I was in my freshman year of college, with high hopes and fond memories (not) of my high school computer math and statistics class, in which we sat in front of TRS-80's networked to a printer. Every day our class president would write a little basic program to print "(teacher's name) is a dick" over and over. The teacher would notice that the printer was running and would dutifully walk over to it, examine the output, and say "Heyyyyy.... ummmm," and that's when the class president would restart his machine to destroy the evidence. Good times. My, how networking and the high school tech experience has changed.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
I saw toad.com on the list, and was wondering if Dave Troy of Atari lore was the guy who first registered that domain. He and Jennifer were ahead of the curve on many counts, so it wouldn't surprise me.
I believe that website was made in 1985, and hasn't been updated since.
The page the link brings you to is full of ads for domain squatters, including a big picture one at the bottom for "Domain Fool", which "brings you domain names at foolish discounts!"
So, they tried to figure out what domain names you might want, BOUGHT THEM from under you for pennies, and now are trying to sell them back to you for piles of money...
"Hey, new mothers! After you have your baby, we're gonna take it, then sell it back to you for a FOOLISH DISCOUNT! Woo woo!"
...to give the next generation something to brag about.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I was worried until my conscious mind had the time to process the fact that TimeCube != Datacube.
I think we should all be glad that TimeCube took much longer to arrive.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Apple is there
Microsoft is not
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
here is a nice linked list of the *.com list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com
One reason why it may of taken a while for commercial sites to become more common on the Internet, was, in the 1980s, there was a strong bias against ANY form of commercial message on the net expressed by many people. Posting a message on UseNET that even came close to an ad could easily get you emailbombed those days. (hard to think of these days, with UseNET so full of spam these days.)
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
Unless you were in the market for a B-2 Stealth bomber
In which case the Northrop Grumman Corporation had a monopoly on the holiday shopping season.
I want to be retired when I grow up.
sco.com
Such a shame it had to come to this...
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Simple and to the point.
BTW this is the guy who can't fly because he refuses to get a government issued ID. Interesting stuff.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I am intrigued by toad.com
Now there's a visionary.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
You would have to report them in real-time since that list is constantly adding to the bottom.
I think it would be more interesting to see the "First 100 dot com's that were sold for big money"
I find it kind of odd that so many of these domains were registered on the same date. Was the registering office only open once a week or was the internet so new and scary that the companies went in groups?
The administrative contact for the oldest name, symbolics.com, has a Compuserve e-mail address.
The Stargate movie came out in 1994 according to IMDB, yet in the first 100 domain names I find:
stargate.com
pyramid.com
vortex.com
portal.com
rosetta.com
Neat.
------- Driver carries less than 64K of cache.
From TFA: The first top level domains were COM, ORG, EDU, GOV, MIL and ccTLD.
This seems to imply the possibility of a domain named 'whatever.cctld'. They should have just come out and listed the ccTLDs available at the beginning (UK, SU, etc.)
Before all this junk, wasn't there was a top level domain called .ARPA? There were gateways from ARPAnet to other nets such as BITNET and so on...
.org was not created for non-profit organizations, it was originally created as a catch-all for organizations that didn't meet the requirements for the other gTLDs. PIR's History Page, RFC 920, RFC 1591
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Number 10! Of course, now it redirects to Telcordia. I knew that Bellcore was of the first ones, but never imagined to be number 10. I could've imagine Bell Labs and AT&T to register earlier. Oh well, those were the days...
Vi havas e-poston.
Keep in mind that in those days the Internet was not supposed to be used for commercial purposes.
.com's were only supposed to be on the net as a convenience for fostering research collaboration between them and their .edu partners.
.edu to a .edu, from a .edu to a .com it had a research relationship with, or from a .com to a .edu it had a research relationship, but .com's were not supposed to exchange email directly.
In those days,
In theory, it was OK to send email from a
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
In March 1986, it's interesting to see that HP, Bell, IBM, SUN, Intel and TI registered their domain during the same month. IBM and SUN, but also Intel and TI got theirs on the exact same day.
____
nico
Nico-Live
STARGATE.COM August 5 1986
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Remember that this took place during the time frame of the transition from a research oriented network (the ARPANET) to a larger, more production oriented network. The World Wide Web in it's current form had not even been invented yet. The creation of the .com domain was driven by a technical requirement to switch to a hierarchical based system, replacing a flat name space. The first step was to adopt the temporary .arpa domain name. Most companies then switched from the .arpa domain to the .com domain when their technical staff was ready to make the transition.
In other words, registering for a .com domain was an administrative necessity for the relatively small number of companies that were connected to the DARPA Internet at that time. It was not a business decision.
Putting this in context, during this same time frame lot of universities were connected to a different network, called CSNET. BITNET was also very active during this period. Although there were interconnections between the DARPA Internet, CSNET, and BITNET, each was a truly independent network. A lot of companies with Unix installations were on UUCP (which did not use a domain based name system).
Considering the market segments that companies like Microsoft were involved with in the mid 1980's, it should not surprise anyone that they were not among the first to register for .com domains. It would not have made any sense for them to do so.
Either I'm having DNS resolution difficulties or the site http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/first71.html has dropped off the air.
Does anyone else find it interesting that STARGATE.COM and PYRAMID.COM were registered number 25 and 29 respectively?
Just goes to show you that conspiracies can be found everywhere if you look hard enough.
Stargate.com?
Octopus.com?
*swings tinfoil hat to the side, b-boy style, yo*
Wow DEC registered BEFORE (but not by much) IBM!!
And that was AFTER Ken Olson had gone senile!
Hey, I had a portal.com account -- cup.portal.com to be precise.
I used an Amiga to access that machine over PPP, and before that UUCP. Prior to that it was UUCP to a DEC associates' VAX, and two hops to DECVAX. Pretty good turnaround on usenet too. It was that UUCP connection that finally got me to 9600 bps, which cost quite a bit in those days. When broadband came along in the 90's, I was all over that. No more modems!
RM
}#q NO CARRIER
There were a bunch of machines connected in 1987, but not using the domain name system....USENET was thriving at that time but machine names and emailing was based on the x!y!x system of addressing not domains. I started at a commerical company in 1982 called Quantime in London which had a USENET connection and we emailed all over the world. So these are not the first companies on line but the first to register with these new fangled "domain" thingies :-). Who can forget kremvax !
97 November 16, 1987 cayman.com
If you don't hear from me in a few days, can someone contact my Mom. Thanks.
If only I'd had my mind on cybersquatting instead of "Dungeons & Dragons" back in the day...
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
UUCP is dead. LONG LIVE UUCP!
I remember those obtuse mail routings with lists of exclamation point delimited domains.
In fact, I know UUCP is still still in use in many places.
I am surprised that AlGore.com wasnt at the top of the list! ;-)
Devil6God7
> Some companies realized that this will be the future (and I'm honestly surprised to see Siemens on the list, they must've had better and more visionary people in their upper echelons back then), and they registered their trademark as a com domain rather than fighting a lengthy battle with domain grabbers as many have done later.
At the time we (I speak as a Siemens employee about the time) were developing a Unix based minicomputer systes based around National Semiconductor chips - the MX range of computers which were widely used by the German State (post, trains, work service etc). We then moved onto an i386 architecture, first with a port of SCO Unix then we did the actual Intel port of Unix 5.4 for AT&T. Our customers were pretty heavy users of TCP/IP - for network printing and file sharing.
I don't know who registered siemens.com, we also had siesoft.co.uk for the UK. However the Unix visionary was Hans Strack Zimmermann. I don't recall the research headquarters in Munich having great connectivity at the time. I seem to recall most traffic went via UUCP via Dusseldorf university and was charged by the kilobyte but we did have ftp access by about 1988. I ran up a 70,000 DM bill with a colleague downloading stuff like the King James Bible!!!
Siemens was a founder member of the OSF so has pretty good credentials.
Really? Out of necessity or just for nostalgic/inertia reasons?
I just see fetchmail these days - nobody seems to be more than one missing link away from the internet anymore.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Although we were 78th on that list, I believe that we were among the very first to place an ad that used an email address as a contact point. I was able to find an ad from the August, 1987, issue of Unix World, where we gave our email address as ucbvax!sun!ide!sales, using the UUCP format. Our customers were developers and early adopters, mostly on Sun workstations, so we actually got some email and some sales leads in this way. Of course, we switched to the "@ide.com" format as soon as we were able to do so. (Please post a reply if you are aware of an earlier use of an email address in a published ad.)
Fun times....
Jeez, I was half expecting to see AlGore.com as the first one, since he invented the Internet and all.
"Have you ever heard of this "internet"? It's the new inter-netting they upt inside swim trunks. It provides a Comforting snugness"
You'd think that—with all the tables in that HTML—they might have actually been able to align the domain names with the friggin' dates!
...is that an old-line mining and manufacturing corporation like ALCOA was on that list.
The first dot com was command dot com. *me ducks*
Whew, close call.
Then it was *whack*
Spam boy: Do not try and post the first. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. Neo: What truth? Spam boy: There is no first. Neo: There is no first? Spam boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the first that is posted, it is only yourself, being a fucktard.
which is totally what she said
I always wondered where x.org fit into the mix, given how unique it is for its single-letter.
Am I just missing something here? Where's algore.com? I mean if he invented it you'd think he'd have been on it...
It would be insteresting who has the first .net domain.
getting an internet connection prior to about 1990 was really really hard and expensive BBN had a lock on providing new connections and the cost was beyond mere mortals
That site's layout is even dumber than slashdot's! The present a two-column by one hundred row table as... a table with all the first column in one td element and all the other in another. One row! So if the stupidly fixed-width column isn't quite wide enough - perhaps you've told your browser to limit the teensiness that dickhead site designers can inflict on you, as I have - they get out of sync.
...just noticed that it's even dumber than I thought - the TABLE is limited to not fill the otherwise available column space. The head is quite far enough up the backdoor as to be invisble from out here...
This isn't just bad design, it's stupid. Really really stupid, stupid, stupid. Nearly as stupid as posting this piece of crap on the slash...
http://geekandhumor.blogspot.com/2007/12/first-dot-com-com-ever-in-world.html
Shocking!
http://www.whoisd.com/oldestcom.php is the list I have had in my bookmark for a good few years..
Why is that website so damn ugly? Is design sense inversely proportional to domain length????
Yeah, the Symbolics website today doesn't look at all like it did in 1985. It's a dim shadow of its former glory.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Wired Magazine famously squatted mcdonalds.com in 1994. Worth a read for those wondering what the pre-dot-com corporate mentality was like.
#!
See there WAS networking prior to Microsoft. In fact, I find it interesting that Microsoft isn't one of the top 100...what the hell were they (not) thinking?
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
We had names the other way round in those days, most significant bit first: uk.co.phcomp
Where's sex.com?!
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
What I wanna know is, when was the first pr0n domain name registered?
I registered with NIC.DDN.MIL in 1988 or 1989, probably why I was able to get a three letter domain name itself. Of course in those days you had to have sponsorship of some kind through the NSF, and that made it a bit harder to get connected to the net.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I see Apple.com... Where's Microsoft.com?
Interesting to note that microsoft.com was not one of those first 100. Not unexpected, but it does somewhat show how they weren't an innovator in the networked computing and explains why they didn't even treat it as a priority until Windows 2000.
I think this list is more apropos as people tend to think of the world wide web 'being' the Internet...
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113224527/http://www.fidouk.org/wwwcom.html
It's a list of functional www.*.com web servers in February of 1995. (the archive is from 1998, but the page was last edited in 95)
I didn't think that the web would take off at that point, but was personally responsible for setting up a handful of those web sitest and registering their domains... This was pre-yahoo/hotmail and most other high traffic web sites that exist today.
As compared to Apple, a massive old-school defense contractor that's only recently transitioned from nuclear guidance systems to MP3 players.
:(
Did anyone else get the same mental picture...? You, sir, owe me a new laptop.
You might have noticed 3COM.COM on that list, about half way down. Strictly speaking it was not allowed to use a number as the first letter in a DNS name. To quote from RFC 1035:
"The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less."
I remember wondering how 3COM got away with it.
I worked for BBN when they registered their .com and didn't even know it.
That's it, nothing more exciting than that...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
I remember all of these companies what I was in college. SCO used to be a good company when they made Xenix and other Unix flavor OS for the x86 platform and they where really located near Santa Cruz, CA (they where located in Scotts Valley, CA which is on the highway going to Santa Cruz). How far have they gone from that era. I have worked on used or worked the companies on this first 100 list. Prime, Apple, Wyse, Datacube, Convergent, Pyramid, Tek, ATT (the 3Bxxx stuff), Gene and few more I don't remember but I was at a spin off/start up in college at that time I was a developer and QA person so I had to test these devices with our software that we developed. So many of these companies have merged out of existence or gone out of business. Ahh the good old days.
Back around 1992 I gave a 2 hour long presentation on the World Wide Web to my fellow B.Comp undergrads using Mosaic and showing sites like NASA, and a handful of IT companies who had some limitted content up and running. I remember thinking, man - this has HUGE potential! Someones going to make a killing on this... 15 years later and I now know that THAT SOMEONE should have been me. Instead.. with my B.Comp degree in hand and plenty of ideas... I sat back and watched every idea that I'd ever had with my friends over lunch, get implemented by somebody else and take off (even if only for a little while). Lesson learned. For every dreamer, you must have someone willing to make it a reality - otherwise you're just a spectator with cool ideas.
My company at the time would have been an early registration except for one thing. ... They did not know they were supposed to register! We built this big Intranet Infrastructure and started selling WAN services to large companies and wrote software to send email between cc:Mail and MS-Mail and Profs and ... a ton more using SNMP across the WAN (this was before all of the mail engines had SNMP gateways, and X.400 was expected to be the next big thing).. It was not until "this Internet thing" started catching on, and customers asked us for "Internet access" .. We already had it for us, so we said "sure" and set up a couple of gateways and the customers started using the, not very secret, SNMP back-end to send cc:Mail/MS-Mail messages to people outside their company and started complaining that when they sent e-mail to other companies, the replies did not work ... I was in Washington DC and my company headquarters was in California. They asked me to fly out and have a look at the problem. As soon as I got to California, I went to see the person in charge of the DNS, who was reading the "bind" man page and looking at her DNS entries trying to figure out why it wasn't working.
... no firewalls back then either. All this came out when this person in support told the "wrong DNS" story to someone on the list above who actually KNEW how the world worked and they said "bullshit! go fix your domain".
... I even wrote some of the e-mail stuff, but I only wanted to get the Intranet and gateways to work... didn't need to send to the outside world, and I had a company supplied dedicated ISDN line at home, using DNS. Like a week before I went to California, I sent an e-mail to the author of Kermit about a bug I had found, which was the first time I had ever sent an e-mail to anyone in the real world. He called me on the phone to say his reply bounced... I said "too busy now .. got to go to California for some problem they can't figure out... will look at it when I get back and send you another message when it's fixed.."
:-)
So I asked her... did you forget to pay your dues? Maybe our domain registration expired. She looked up and said "dues"? "registration"? What the hell are you talking about?
Today that wouldn't work for three minutes because the reverse DNS wouldn't work, but back then nobody enforced reverse DNS, so if you had your own DNS that was configured properly, you could work fine until someone in the outside world tried to send a message. Even then, people would just put you in their hosts file and forget about it. We were the DNS for everybody, so nobody noticed. I even found out someone in support had told people the problem was their DNS address was wrong, and in addition to our customers, a bunch of other corporations (not our customers) had changed their corporate wide DNS entries to point to our DNS!
It wasn't my job so I never gave it a thought because I was not much of an e-mail guy; usually ignored mine
Today the domain would be owned by some scalper who would have charged us a million or two to sell it to us.
It's a nice bit of nostalgia for us old folk.
did anyone else happen to notice the insanely long URL for the linked site? http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/ that has to be a record of some sort...