Slashdot Mirror
Internet's First Registered Domain Name Sold
MojoKid writes "Believe it or not, it wasn't internet.com or dot.com that was acquired when the Internet was young. Instead, it was the somewhat off-the-wall name of symbolics.com. The Symbolics company was the first
to use an internet domain name to guide Internet viewers to its line of Lisp machines, which were single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. XF.com Investments, which is a Missouri-based Internet investments firm, has managed to secure the domain name from its original owner for an undisclosed sum and XF's CEO was quick to proclaim his excitement over the acquisition. It's hard to say why this domain name was the first registered back on March 15, 1985, but for obvious reasons it holds a special place in history. There has been one original owner for nearly 25 years. Over that time, we've seen the Internet grow to the tune of 180,000,000+ registered domains, and thousands more are being added each and every day."
make an offer.
Imagine being able to choose any domain name you wanted.... ... and choosing "Symbolics.com".
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Do we really need a tag to tell us it's a story?
That company crops up in various stories. Before Richard Stallman decided to launch the GNU project to give people freedom, he spent two years out-programming Symbolics as punishment for their destruction of MIT's hacker community. Here's where some of the story can be found, about half way down.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
take your pick
I wish I could figure out how to delete (stupid) comments. Please ignore and move along. Thanks.
Unless you define the internet as the .com name space. The .edu name space is older and was just as much the internet.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
I never drank the Lisp Kool-Aid so I wasn't into lispms, but we had a Symbolics machine in college (is 3600 a model? that's all my dusty brain can cough up) and the keyboard was a real work of art! You had to stare at it for a while just to notice the QWERTY part floating in the ocean of other keys. The UI was pretty slick too. If only there were something like this for a language I *liked*.
Wrong. Did you and the two cluebots who modded you informative even bother to RTFT (Title)?
It says First Domain Name Sold.
All other domains prior to this symbolics.com domain were not sold, they were given to their (mostly) university, government and military owners for free.
You mean the title on the slasdot post that says "Internet's First Registered Domain Name Sold"? or the title on the article itself that says "Internet's First Registered Domain Is Finally Sold, But For How Much?"?
It says First Domain Name Sold.
No it doesn't and it wasn't sold. Back then all domain names were free for the asking. The title should be "The first registered .com domain name was just sold."
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
DNS was introduced in the mid-80s. Established internet domains (network, govt, military, universities) transitioned more slowly to the new system via the temporary .arpa TLD.
Symbolics, on the other hand, jumped on board right away. symbolics.com is the oldest domain name in use today.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
" It's hard to say why this domain name was the first registered back on March 15, 1985,"
I'd guess maybe because Symbolics was the original MIT spinoff Lisp machine company, and during the 80s Lisp was the Artificial Intelligence language poised to become THE lingua franca for computing, everywhere.
The GUI was invented on Lisp machines. Emacs was inspired by Lisp machines.
1985 was the heyday of the Strategic Computing Initiative which funnelled US $1 billion into the attempt to build, basically, a literal Skynet - the last great push for coordinated defense AI.
In 1985 Cisco was a year old and ARPANET had only been running this newfangled TCP/IP thing for two. If you were to pick one company to, ahem, symbolise the shiny face of tomorrow - well, other than maybe IBM or Bolt, Beranek and Newman - yeah, Symbolics would have been way up there.
I still miss that future we didn't get to see.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
This was perhaps the first domain name registered under ".com", not the first domain name.
What you're seeing here is the beginning of DNS replacing HOSTS.TXT. Before DNS, every site had to FTP over a new copy of the HOSTS.TXT file from SRI-NIC to update the name to IP address translation. There were thousands of names in HOSTS.TXT before the transition, and they all predate this one. Many were grandfathered into ".com". I had domain names in HOSTS.TXT from 1982 or so.
The original idea was to have a much more hierarchical system. Big organizations would have one (1) domain, like "FORD", with other domains under that. So the global name file was expected to be small.
Unless you define the internet as the .com name space.
The .com TLD is not the internet name space, but the internet namespace does include the .com TLD, so it standa to reason that a .com domain could be the first registered on the internet.
The .edu name space is older and was just as much the internet.
.arpa, .com, .edu, .gov, .mil and .org TLDs were all established simultaneously in an RFC published in the fall of 1984. None of them is technically older than any of the others. Practically speaking though the first officially registered and functioning domain name on the internet is SYMBOLICS.COM came into being on March 1985, predating the approximately simultaneous registration of several university .edu domains by about a month.
If you want to be pedantic there were perhaps dozens of internet domain names that simultaneously became the "first domain names". These were all .arpa domains and were all temporary. Prior to the establishment of any internet-wide root nameservers resolving hostnames to domain names used a resolver that read a locally stored text file called hosts. The hosts file was generated and maintained centrally by university researchers and manually downloaded by sysadmins to EVERY COMPUTER ON THE INTERNET that needed to resolve hostnames. The "official" hosts file of the internet was flat in structure--there was no defined levels like today. An informal structure was established using hyphens as separators (a host might be named in a pattern like COMPUTERNAME-UNIVERSITYNAME) but there was no standards applied or technical significance to the structure as there is in today's DNS.
When the nameservers came online they were set up with the official hosts file as it existed at that time, within the .arpa TLD. The .arpa TLD was meant to be temporary--it allowed internet hosts to transition to DNS client resolvers from hostname files seamlessly. Config files, databases, etc. may have referred to hosts by name, and by using the temporary .arpa TLD the name resolver could be changed without disruption (note how name resolution works to this day--if you do not use a FQDN your computer appends the supplied hostname to the domain of your own host--since at the beginning all domain names were .arpa this scheme allowed dns resolution to behave exactly like the original hostname file).
All those .arpa domains are gone now--but the .arpa TLD did become permanent--when standards for doing REVERSE lookups were established the domain in-addr.arpa was created. There are a handful of .arpa domains that exist to manage the inner workings of various DNS functions, but .arpa has never been open to domain registrations from the public--all .arpa domains are established through internet standards.
So, though .arpa domains were technically the firs, YOU are wrong and the article summary was RIGHT. symbolics com was the first REGISTERED domain on the entire public internet.
Actually there's only a few thousand 'serious' domains registered... the rest are just junk domains registered by spammers and malware peddlers... ;)
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Have they gone bust or did they go bust years ago and what was left of the company kept the name? Did a former CTO squirrel it away somewhere for a rainy day and $$$$ ?
I'd say that there were some directories, bridging the gap between word of mouth knowledge of domain names and search engines capable of indexing the entire WWW. Yahoo, for instance, was more useful when it was more useful in its early days than the search engines of the time, because it included a hierarchical directory of websites. I'm sure you had something different in mind, but similar nonetheless. It was the explosion in websites that made it untenable to maintain such a directory, though, and that's why Google was so perfectly timed.