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.
... 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!
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.
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.
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
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
.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.
It was free for a long time. Then they started charging a one-time administration fee (the amount of which I've long since forgotten). And finally we came to the annual-fee arrangement in place now.
"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....
"And I'm a PC!"
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?