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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
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'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
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?
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.
I believe that website was made in 1985, and hasn't been updated since.
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
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.
.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.
There was an electronic form, a text file you'd download from sri-nic.arpa (later nic.ddn.mil), fill in the blanks and email back to sri-nic.
For all that, it wasn't all that far removed from "Hey Jack".
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
Not so much a cost issue but up until the mid-90's the PITA factor was a major hit in setting up a domain. No hosting services, so you'd need your own server. Private lines were way expensive and difficult to get set up with the phone company. No DSL so you'd need ISDN (56k! Wicked fast!) or bone up for a T1 or partial T1 which could run you $1000/month easy. Not to mention all the paperwork you'd have to submit to interNIC, etc. The best revenge on all the domain squatting is that all the "now a household word" domains use words no one would think were valuable - yahoo, google, etc ad infinitum. Have you had a need to visit computer.com? telephone.com? television.com?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
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.
Before the domain name system was invented, there were just hostnames. ARPANET hosts had single, flat hostnames like SRI-NIC or UCBVAX (at Berkeley) or SU-TAC (Stanford) or MIT-EDDIE (which had a sibling, MIT-DEEP-THOUGHT). These were all kept in a single flat text file, maintained centrally by SRI-NIC (the Network Information Center at Stanford Research International).
.ARPA was invented as a temporary transitional measure. All those existing flat hostnames gained a .ARPA suffix, so they could be made to fit into the DNS while each institution managed a transition to "real" domains.
.arpa contains only certain low-level infrastructure like in-addr.arpa.
When the ARPANET started implementing the DNS,
Today, as already mentioned,
> 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.
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....
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
Wired Magazine famously squatted mcdonalds.com in 1994. Worth a read for those wondering what the pre-dot-com corporate mentality was like.
#!