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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.
I suspect that most of these companies are on the list because they were engaged as defense contractors at the time.
I wonder when Microsoft finally got on board? Damn, I shoulda squatted!!!
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
It looks like they went in groups, too. IBM, Sun, Intel, and TI all in one day. 3Com, Tandy, Unisys, and AMD on another. It probably wasn't an individual decision for each company. It'd be too much of a coincidence.
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
It's not like they went to the Yahoo! Small Business website and registered the domains on their credit cards for $7.99.
Whoever was maintaining the canonical copy of the hosts file had plenty of other stuff to do, this was just a minor chore for them. So it's reasonable to think that updates would get bunched up and made whenever he happened to have some free time.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
As compared to Apple, a massive old-school defense contractor that's only recently transitioned from nuclear guidance systems to MP3 players.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
> 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.
And once the Marketing Types found out about domain names, they were determined to turn it back into a flat namespace, ignoring subdomains and top-level domains other than .com.
--Dan
Web Tips
...is that an old-line mining and manufacturing corporation like ALCOA was on that list.
I probably should stop myself from counter-nitpicking this particular nitpick. The important fact here is that RFC920 has never been enforced and wasn't all the realistic to begin with. To argue about the precise meaning of rules that have never been enforced (Does Slashdot violate the RFC by being commercial or by being not a non-profit?) is kind of silly.