Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
This is kind of off-topic, but I once had an old vt220 terminal with a similar keyboard. I hooked it up to my Linux workstation's serial port. I was able to get a workable console without editing too many files, but what really surprised me was that many of the special keys along the top of the keyboard mapped to quite sensible emacs commands. There was "Do" key that mapped to M-x, "Find" mapped to C-s, "Remove" was C-d. I remember thinking that it was pretty cool so much of the legacy support is still there and works out of the box.
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....
They allowed other registrations at hierarchical levels of .us, like yourname.yourcity.yourstate.us (e.g., yourname.miami.fl.us).
--Dan
Web Tips
In 1985 it would have been hard to envision the 'net as we know it now. It was nearly 10 years before the general public would discover the web. Why were these companies bothering? Mostly just for professional collaboration via telnet or ftp, right?
http://geekandhumor.blogspot.com/2007/12/first-dot-com-com-ever-in-world.html
http://www.whoisd.com/oldestcom.php is the list I have had in my bookmark for a good few years..
Wired Magazine famously squatted mcdonalds.com in 1994. Worth a read for those wondering what the pre-dot-com corporate mentality was like.
#!
As a hardware company. They had some serious comp sci types in their consulting practice that continued on until around the mid 90s. One of the principle consultants explained their practice this way to me: "We figure out how to do things that others have tried to do and failed at -- repeatedly." Ironically, this skillset only applied to computer science problems. They didn't know how to make a sustainable business out of having a bunch of hugely smart guys on the payroll. The problem is when one of those guys leaves, he leaves a big hole.
If this had been a few years later, things might have been different. The Internet created a whole new set of practical problems for serious computer science firepower. But maybe not. Ironically, the whole dot com thing largely passed the academically fed Boston area informatics scene by. People were more accustomed to the world of cold war defense contracting and big, slow moving companies than the down and dirty world of e-commerce. Even Facebook, which pretty much would have been nothing without the founders' Harvard student connection, moved out to California as soon as possible so the VCs could keep an eye on them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Odd that they'd bother with access controls. Apple allowed anonymous FTP back then, with which you could download system-software updates, tech notes, and whatever else would've been on there at the time. ftp.apple.com is still up and running and still accepting anonymous logins, but most of its contents got moved to their website long ago.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.