25 Years of the .com gTLD

An anonymous reader writes "The domain COM was installed as one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet in January 1985. The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15th of March — the 25th anniversary of the day the first .com name was registered. Of the 250 million websites, there are over 80 million active .com sites. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in .com (however, on 27 August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments). That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon. Here is a list of the 100 oldest still-existing registered .com domains."

Comments

mcc.com?

[oldhack]

Who were they?

Re:mcc.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume these guys, who I desperately wanted to work for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_and_Computer_Technology_Corporation

Re:mcc.com?

[toastar]

Who were they?

http://web.archive.org/web/19970214020411/http://www.mcc.com/

the internet archive rocks!

Re:mcc.com?

[winphreak]

I wonder if any of those job positions ever got filled...

http://web.archive.org/web/19970214021426/www.mcc.com/jobs/

No ..

[Anonymous Coward]

No microsoft.com ?

Re:No ..

[Dilligent]

No microsoft.com ?

Microsoft didnae believe in the internet... it was not until the mid 90ies when they realised that it had taken off without them aboard.

Re:No ..

[Yvan256]

Microsoft thought the internet was a fad and that everybody would use a Microsoft-branded network (can't remember the name, it was similar to Compuserve or something). I remember having to install Trumpet or WinSocket or whatever the name was, just to add TCP/IP to Windows 3.11 so I could browse websites.

Re:No ..

[isorox]

Microsoft thought the internet was a fad and that everybody would use a Microsoft-branded network (can't remember the name, it was similar to Compuserve or something

The Microsoft Network - MSN - came with win95.

Re:No ..

[mikael_j]

Dear Mr Troll, what are you rambling about? The post you replied to simply explained why microsoft.com wasn't on the list of the 100 oldest .com domains and was absolutely correct in that as far as they were concerned MSN was the network of the future and that it wasn't until the mid-90s that MS started taking the internet seriously.

Basically, the parent and grandparent posts had nothing to do with AOL or Compuserve.

Re:No ..

[dissy]

No no no you blithering idiot!

Compuserve and AOL were doing a pretty good job of making their closed networks the defining online experience years before the Internet started eating their lunch. M$ wasn't even in the picture.

How wrong could you possibly be?!?

Re:No ..

[Darinbob]

Quite a lot of people thought the internet was a fad. The big thing was with LANs, and there were several competing networking protocols in the LAN arena. You didn't need the internet to send global email or documents (plenty of internet gateways took care of that). It took a long time for TCP/IP to catch on, but because the protocol was open and understandable and not tied to a vendor it had plenty of opportunities to grow.

Re:No ..

[W3bbo]

Not quite so true, I'm afraid.

Whilst Microsoft was late to the party (we're talking early-1990s) they never had the impression they could supplant the Internet with something proprietary.

The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet and all included access to the World Wide Web.

So basically MSN (the original one) was Microsoft's competitor to AOL and not "The Internet".

Microsoft didn't include TCP/IP in early versions of Windows because there just wasn't any demand, and third-parties were already making their own add-ons that provided this. Much the same reason IPv6 wasn't added to Windows until Vista even though IPv6's specifications were stable enough by the release of XP SP2 in 2005. I'm sure they had better things at the time for their developers to work on.

Re:No ..

[networkzombie]

Domain Name.......... microsoft.com, Creation Date........ 1991-05-02

Re:No ..

[nxtw]

The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet and all included access to the World Wide Web.

Except for perhaps MSN, these services included access to only parts of the Internet. CompuServe added Internet email access earlier than the others in 1989, and AOL added Usenet in 1993. Prodigy added a web browser (no sockets support) in 1994.

I don't think these services started offering real Internet (with TCP sockets support) until after the release of Windows 95.

Much the same reason IPv6 wasn't added to Windows until Vista even though IPv6's specifications were stable enough by the release of XP SP2 in 2005.

IPv6 wasn't enabled by default until Vista, but was included with XP from the beginning. (The version included with the original XP release was included as an unsupported preview.) MS also released experimental IPv6 implementations for NT4 and 2000.

Re:No ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for perhaps MSN, these services included access to only parts of the Internet. CompuServe added Internet email access earlier than the others in 1989, and AOL added Usenet in 1993.

Me too!!!!!!

[aoluser joke]

Re:No ..

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet

No, they weren't. AOL and CompuServe, and most of the other online services (not sure about MSN) ran their own proprietary networks, using non-IP protocols.

and all included access to the World Wide Web.

Eventually, yes, but they didn't start out doing that. They all wanted to be The Future Of Online Services, and hoped the internet would go away quietly, or at least stay restricted to educational and government use.

Re:No ..

[digitalcowboy]

The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet and all included access to the World Wide Web.

I'm not sure if you're wrong about this or I've misunderstood what you're trying to say. But (unfortunately) I wasted a couple months in the mid 90's doing (outsourced) tech support for CompuServe, after first discovering it on a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981 with a 300 baud "coupler" style modem that required a telephone handset to be firmly inserted.

I suspect you're not wrong, just imprecise and I'm being pedantic. However, in the 90's, CompuServe was dying a slow death trying to keep a proprietary hold on something that had become an open commodity. You're correct that at that point it had become a "value-added content [layer] on top of services provided by the Internet and ... included access to the World Wide Web."

It didn't start out that way and pre-dated any public access to the internet by more than a decade. AOL came later as well as Prodigy and Apple's failed attempt at e-something or other. (eWorld? I'm too old to remember and too lazy to check it.)

None of them adapted well to the rapidly changing landscape. What's more, when I was doing tech support for CS, it was owned by H&R Block. I joined in February and as tax day approached our internal network slowed to a crawl - as in: click a button on the internal ticket system and wait literally 5 minutes for a response over the WAN. It seems H&R bought the company for the physical network because they only needed it for a few months a year. As with most parasites, they quickly managed to kill the host. (My "supervisors" kept saying, "Hang in there until April 16th and everything'll be back to normal.")

Not that the internet wouldn't have killed CS anyway, but the short-sightedness was amazing.

Now then. About my lawn and your presence on it...

Re:No ..

[SgtAaron]

I remember having to install Trumpet or WinSocket or whatever the name was, just to add TCP/IP to Windows 3.11 so I could browse websites.

Close! Strange how memory works. Put those two together and you get "Trumpet Winsock". You just tickled a few memories: I remember I was really happy to buy Win95 so I wouldn't have to deal with Trumpet Winsock anymore. Well, and let's face it, it was an improvement to 3.11, but really I think my packard hell computer ran the older much faster than the new, but networking was easier. Thanks to the internet I found slackware linux some few months later. No more winsock.dll... :)

As for the story topic, later I found out how much a racket network solutions was with their outrageous domain registration fees, and heard about this guy Aveek Datta and ml.org, which we would provide free domain names under ml.org for anybody. Thousands and thousands signed up--clearly average people didn't want to pay $100+ for a .com name. I helped run that for awhile, and it was a worthy cause in my book. It was hard to like network solutions. I couldn't have helped if I hadn't spent hours fixing my screwups in slackware, on a side note :)

Re:No ..

[pipingguy]

Sheesh, memory lane. I was no early adopter, but I remember my 14.4 modem-equipped 486DX66 connecting to CompuServe. Then I discovered the REAL internet via Matrox's Spherenet.

Re:No ..

[Crimsonjade]

I am confused. You didn't need the internet to send email or documents because you had internet gateways? Either you mistyped that sentence or you need to clarify what you mean.

Re:No ..

[Darinbob]

You didn't need the internet in your office, or even TCP/IP, or even a LAN really. Internet gateway meant you could have mail from your network or computer make its way onto the proto-internet, and then it might even leave that internet onto another type of network. Ie, usenet for a couple of explicitly specified hops, then onto the internet, then passed onto SPANNET (DECNET based space research network).

Re:No ..

[jonadab]

In the eighties, are you kidding? Microsoft was still selling DOS. Networking, even at the LAN level, hadn't even occurred to them yet. People with modems (a small minority) could dial a BBS...

Re:No ..

[Jon_S]

Yeah, I had an AOL account back in the early/mid 90's. I remember Steve Case e-mailing all the AOL members that they have heard the many requests from members for access to this "world wide web" thing and that perhaps someday they would actually allow access to it through AOL.

Strange days indeed.

Re:No ..

[houghi]

The first Windows95 CD was without Internet Explorer. My ISP send me one floppy with Netscape 1.0 on it. Also Trupet WInsock for Win3.1 and an emailprogram, but for Windows 95, the connection was already available.

Re:No ..

[TheRaven64]

There were lots of proprietary email systems. You could send intra-office email without the Internet and big companies just had leased lines or even dial-up connections that did store-and-forward messaging between sites, without the Internet. Big proprietary networks like Compuserve and AOL had their own email systems and you could communicate with their users without connecting to the Internet.

Back then, more home users had access to Compuserve or AOL than had Internet access. My father's company had accounts with both because some of their customers only wanted to use one for electronic communication. They also had an Internet connection with Demon, who provided an SMTP service for your domain ({username}.demon.co.uk) so they just had a local SMTP server on the company network dial in every few hours, send pending messages and collect incoming ones and forward them to the company mail system. The company LAN used IPX and wasn't directly connected to the Internet.

A bit later, the walled gardens started bridging their mail systems with the Internet, so you could email AOL users with {their username}@aol.com, and so on. This increased the number of people AOL users could talk to via email, but it reduced the utility of using an Online Service Provider, rather than an Internet Service Provider, because OSPs were offering all of the same content as ISPs. There was no point publishing new content with OSPs because if you published it on the Internet OSP and ISP customers could access it, while if you published it with an OSP only their customers could access it.

As the saying goes, those who do not learn from history are condemned to use Facebook.

Squatters

[thefear]

A list dominated by domain squatters, even XF.com is a domain squatter...

Re:tomato

[toastar]

tomato

But It's pronounced tomato!

They should have kept the price high

[Jazz-Masta]

When it was only InterNIC assigning domain names, it was $100/year, and then $70/year. I remember carefully choosing which domains to register - and so did everyone else. There were very few squatters back then.

I believe passing the torch to ICANN, and then having GoDaddy (Wild West) pop up offering $6 .COM will be remembered as the ruin of the Internet. Not to mention the 2-3 day "evaluation" period where squatters could hold a domain without paying for it.

Now they've opened up .CO (Columbian) for non-Columbian registration. Pre-registration is $299, and the registrars are trying to push it as the next big TLD.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[toastar]

When it was only InterNIC assigning domain names, it was $100/year, and then $70/year. I remember carefully choosing which domains to register - and so did everyone else. There were very few squatters back then.

I believe passing the torch to ICANN, and then having GoDaddy (Wild West) pop up offering $6 .COM will be remembered as the ruin of the Internet. Not to mention the 2-3 day "evaluation" period where squatters could hold a domain without paying for it.

Now they've opened up .CO (Columbian) for non-Columbian registration. Pre-registration is $299, and the registrars are trying to push it as the next big TLD.

While I don't disagree on any one point, Godaddy came much later then the endless September, At least on an timetable on scale with the age of the internet.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[Jazz-Masta]

Although Godaddy was around shortly after that, it didn't start to gain momentum until 2002, and only in 2005 did it surpase Network Solutions.

I guess I could have generalized it more and simply said low cost domain services as Dotster, eNOM, were around and about the same size.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[qwijibo]

Back in my day, we didn't have to pay for domains. They were free, you just set up a couple of name servers and emailed in a form. I remember sending uunet $50 back then, not for the domain, but for them to set up a couple of name servers to be authoritative for the domain. When I had my own machines on the net, I provided name servers for free so others could get domains without spending a penny.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[MrCawfee]

Godaddy had the 9.95 price point when their competition was ~25/yr, and it wasn't immediate. .CO is the .new .CM. I work at a registrar and almost all of our .CM registrations tend to be screened out using fake credit cards. Even after it goes live and the price point for .CO is probally going to be ~60/yr, that is still too expensive for the "legitimate" squatter to put up their advertising pages. Judging from the .CM registrations at my company that got through the screening process, they tend to be deleted within a few months when the credit card dispute comes through. The registry doesn't care because they have already gotten their registration fee. I'd say that atleast 50% of our .CM registrations are screened out as fraud automatically, and the remainder are a mix between companies trying for brand protection and fraud. .CO will never be a big legitimate tld, my feeling is that you are going to see:
    a) .CO domains parked or forwarded by legitimate users for brand protection
    b) .CO domains parked by the registrar due to a chargeback so they can get atleast some of the money they lost back.
    c) .CO domains parked by the client until the company that owns the name goes through the dispute process.

Bad thing for the internet, good thing for Columbia, good for .

Re:They should have kept the price high

[toastar]

GoDaddy didn't start until 1999, The internet became mainstream in 1995-ish.

I was using AOL in 94.

5 years in internet time is like 30 years in any other technology.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[fragmentate]

Who should have kept the price high? InterNIC? So, the booty of the late 90's, and now the early 21st century is a bad thing? Rather than snarl at the squatters, they should have made squatting less attractive by allowing more TLDs. A lot of people might be pleased that .xxx will be opening up soon. Imagine the possibilities now! se.xxx sells.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[HaeMaker]

I don't remember it being $100. When I registered hae.com, it was $30 one time to my ISP (InterNIC didn't charge) to setup the domain, DNS, and sendmail. Other ISPs charged per month to maintain the domain, so it was a good deal. This was back in the mid 90s when it was fashionable to get a "vanity plate" domain.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[Anonymous Coward]

urm, domain names were free. all it took was an email. Geek card please.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[Ron Atkinson]

I don't remember it ever being $100, you probably paid for 2 years. When I got my first domain name in the early 90's before the commercialization of the Internet domain name registration was free. I had my name for a couple of years at no charge (also had a class C subnet assigned to me, which I turned back in last year to ARIN). After the InterNIC transferred from SRI over to Network Solutions (think it was 1994 or so), and the Internet became commercial, the government decided to charge $50 for domain names in which $35 went to Network Solutions and $15 to the U.S. Government. After I think 2 years or so it was determined that the $15 could be considered an illegal tax, so that was revoked leaving the standard $35 Network Solutions fee.

I also agree that the downfall of the domain name registration was when it was passed to ICANN. People may have complained about the $35, but we didn't have squatters and people hijacking names just because someone forgot to "pay the bill".

Re:They should have kept the price high

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

The Internet is totally ruined. Nobody uses it anymore, even, it's that bad.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[houghi]

They should never have gone with the generic domain names. nstead just the country names. That would ahve been *.us for the USA. "What about debian.org" you might ask or shlashdot.org? They would have been debian.org.us.
"But that is not international!" you might moan. Well, neither is .com, .net or .org. Basically they are US domains. So instead of a .com, people or companies would have a .com.us name.

Even names like nato.int should be registerd in each country that wants it.

It would then be up to each country (just as it is now) if they would accept registration from other countries or not and what other restrictions (or not) they would want. That way each country can device their subdomain to whatever they desire.

Obviously this will never happen now, so it is only an afterthought.

Also as an afterthought reversing the order would be much more logic, so instead of having example.com.us you would have us.com.example or even /us/com/example. That way the comments page for /. would be http://us/com/slashdot/tech/comments.pl

With the current DNS system that won't work for obvious reasons, but it would have been nice. Again just as an afterthought. I am sure that many people will see issues as they will compare it with what we have now. However if we would have started with the above, we would have found solutions to any issue.

Interesting and maybe humbling

[93 Escort Wagon]

I felt a bit old, and maybe a bit humbled, to see a number of smallish Pacific Northwest companies that are on that list but no longer exist. When I first got out of college I'd interviewed at some of those places!

Re:Interesting and maybe humbling

[frank_adrian314159]

Which ones are you talking about? Both Fluke and Tektronix still exist (though the latter not in its former glory) and Boeing was still in business last time I checked (albeit with HQ now in Chicago). As is Mentor Graphics, etc., etc. And I've actually worked for a couple of those...

Re:Interesting and maybe humbling

[__aasqbs9791]

So what you're saying is I should never let you interview for any position I offer? Did you do something to anger a Gypsy or something?

Re:Interesting and maybe humbling

[93 Escort Wagon]

The two that immediately jumped out at me were Teltone and Data I/O. Technically both still exist; but after buyouts, bankruptcies, and acquisitions I don't believe either one has anything to do with the original companies other than some continuity of legal rights to the names. I had an internship at Teltone way back in the early 80s.

I don't think of Fluke nor Tektronix as being smallish, really - although I realize compared to ATT or IBM they are. And Boeing is huge by almost any standard.

Re:Interesting and maybe humbling

[93 Escort Wagon]

So what you're saying is I should never let you interview for any position I offer? Did you do something to anger a Gypsy or something?

I've never thought of that - you may be right! I've been long aware of a personal history of killing TV shows; the ones I really like tend to die off pretty quick (Quark, Max Headroom, and Twin Peaks come to mind; La Femme Nikita somehow made it through a bit over 4 seasons despite my fanship). So maybe the job thing is just another aspect of that... this university has been having financial trouble the last couple years!

I knew it!

[Anonymous Coward]

25. 05-Aug-1986 STARGATE.COM

This precedes the movie by 8 years. Do you know what that means? It's all real! I knew it! I am so getting myself an F-302. Cheyenne Mountain, here I come.

Re:I knew it!

[toastar]

Stargate Information Systems continued to provide community service until 1988.

I LESS THAN THREE the internet archive.

http://web.archive.org/web/20001210223600/www.stargate.com/history.html

Re:I knew it!

[ImprovOmega]

<3 is the code that you're looking for: <3

Re:I knew it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, a clever cover for the development of the dialing program, no doubt.

Interesting things about that list

[Yvan256]

Both AMD and Intel are on the list, along with many hardware companies.

Funny:
- Apple, IBM and Sun are present
- Microsoft is absent

Strangely missing:
- sex.com
- porn.com
(etc)

Re:Interesting things about that list

[Fred_A]

Strangely missing:
- sex.com
- porn.com
(etc)

People still knew about Usenet back then.
And Goopher sex was only for furries.

Fanboyism

[Yvanhoe]

Apple is there.
Microsoft is not.

Re:Fanboyism

[tlhIngan]

Apple is there.
Microsoft is not.

Microsoft's site was registered sometime in the early 90's, as a test site for the Windows TCP/IP stack. Back in the days when you had to use Trumpet Winsock to connect, prior to Windows 95 (which came with Microsoft's Winsock stack). Of course, it had to be prepped for Win95's launch, but until then, it was really just test servers. It only went "live" after another Microsoft employee testing TCP/IP found it was live and traced it down the hall.

http://www.microsoft.com/misc/features/features_flshbk.htm

Alcoa is 40th oldest?!

[jschen]

I find it surprising that Alcoa is so high up the list, beating out big computer and communications tech names such as AMD, 3COM, Apple, and Cisco. I'm curious as to what compelled them to register a domain name way back in Nov 1986.

Re:Alcoa is 40th oldest?!

[tool462]

Pure speculation on my part, but perhaps they had extensive involvement with universities and the DoD for research purposes, and so were actively involved in what preceded the internet as we know it today. Registering a .com may have been a pretty natural transition for them, based on what they were already doing.

At any rate, it's only a few weeks between the registration date of Alcoa, 3com, and AMD. Cisco was still just a startup (started in 1984). Apple was only doing PCs, and PCs on the internet was pretty unheard of back then.

Re:Alcoa is 40th oldest?!

[Darinbob]

True, probably all of those first 100 sign-ups were from companies who were already on the internet.

Re:Alcoa is 40th oldest?!

[vikingpower]

Alcoa has always been known for its aggressive investigation and then pushing of new technologies.

Re:threadjack

[Anonymous Coward]

They lost the domain to squatters

When I started out

[idontgno]

"DNS" was a "HOSTS.TXT" file FTP'd down from ISI.

Now stop doing zone transfers across my lawn, you punks!

Re:When I started out

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was a copy available from ISI it was a clone. The hosts.txt release came from SRI International.

Now GET OFF MY LAWN you dumb whippersnapper!!!

Re:When I started out

[ginbot462]

I don't see a 3 digit or less id to back that up. Citation please!

Sky news and bad reporting

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I was watching Sky News today and the tech correspondent reported it was 25 years ago since Tim Burners-Lee invented the Internet. Ugh.

https://twitter.com/simonhowes/status/10514026928

Re:Sky news and bad reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

It was twenty years ago today

Re:Sky news and bad reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

He also didn't invent the internet.

Stock performance

[bobdotorg]

I'm curious how the publicly traded stocks of the early adopters fared from time of registration until the peak of the dotcom bubble in March 2000. I suspect abnormally high returns relative to Nasdaq or the S&P500.

Why is Slashdot not a .com?

[mister_playboy]

This story makes me wonder... does anyone know why /. is a .org and not a .com?

Re:Why is Slashdot not a .com?

[geekmux]

This story makes me wonder... does anyone know why /. is a .org and not a .com?

Well, generally speaking, you would reserve a .org for non-profit organizations. Not quite sure if /. is 100% non-profit, but they provide free access to information, accounts are free, and we have the added bonus of disabling ads, so I'd definitely say they're closer to a .org...

Re:Why is Slashdot not a .com?

[icebraining]

I registered the domain name Slashdot.org as a joke. It was 'org' because I didn't want a .com -- those were so common. I always thought org would be cooler, and besides, I had no commercial plans in mind. (Years later this bit me on the ass since someone else registered the .com. Doh!) The URL was meant to be unpronounceable by anyone -- a joke ultimately that has backfired on me countless times when I'm called and asked what the URL is to the damn thing. Jeff 'Hemos' Bates (now a VP of something or other with SourceForge, Inc.) was in the living room when I was registering the domain name. We all wanted email addresses with a unique domain name that wasn't attached to our school, so he chipped in on the registration fee.

A Brief History of Slashdot Part 1, Chips & Dips

Re:Why is Slashdot not a .com?

[cenc]

Public traded company. under ticker symbol LNUX, and you do not need to be a non-profit anything to have a .org .

Re:threadjack

[jnaujok]

Genera is still sold by Symbolics DKS (Germany) and Open Genera is now a closed-source project that runs on Tru64 Unix boxes.

There's supposedly still an open port of Open Genera that's supposed to run on Linux on Alpha CPU's.

Google is your friend: Open Genera

Sad Irony

[Wowlapalooza]

88. 03-Sep-1987 SCO.COM

SCO could probably make far more by selling their "top 100" domain name -- to then be used for a website ridiculing/lambasting Darl McBride et al -- then they could ever hope to make litigating over their dubious-at-best intellectual property claims...

Re:Sad Irony

[Fred_A]

SCO could probably make far more by selling their "top 100" domain name -- to then be used for a website ridiculing/lambasting Darl McBride et al -- then they could ever hope to make litigating over their dubious-at-best intellectual property claims...

Where would we have gotten (I assume that whole mess if over, but you never know) our dose of weekly Internet comedy had they done that ?

stats are wrong

[darthcamaro]

the people that put on this study have some wrong stats. According to VeriSign's own data there are just over 192 million domain names registered now. No idea where that figure of 250 million came from but it's not correct.

See What's New in Microsoft Publisher 97!!

[ArundelCastle]

Earliest WayBack Machine entry for MS:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961020014044/http://www.microsoft.com/

The thing that makes me laugh most about this slice of history is the footer link to /MISC/CPYRIGHT.HTM
I bet they still have some of those 8.3s kicking around.

Northrup == oldest surviving?

[kclittle]

Looking at that oldest-100 list, it would appear that Northrup is the oldest surviving ".COM" TLD (they were the acquirer in the Grumman deal).
Ah, DEC, we knew ye well...

Re:Northrup == oldest surviving?

[david.emery]

Pretty bizarre that whoever bought BBN let "bbn.com" lapse...

Re:Northrup == oldest surviving?

[Darinbob]

Hmm, BBN.COM is owned by Raytheon, who acquired BBN. Not sure if it counts as "surviving". At least when you go there it says BBN, whereas DEC.COM takes you to HP with no mention of DEC.

Re:Northrup == oldest surviving?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAY.COM - where this post is entering the intertubes now.

Oops; time to hit the road for home.

Re:Northrup == oldest surviving?

[Fred_A]

Pretty bizarre that whoever bought BBN let "bbn.com" lapse...

Microsoft.com did lapse once. Apparently the Internic gave it back to the software company instead of the upcoming silky condom manufacturer specializing in small sizes.

53 billion websites???

[david.emery]

At the moment Verisign logs 53 billion requests for websites - not just dotcoms - every day, about the same number handled for all of 1995.
"We expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between three and four quadrillion," Mr McLaughlin told BBC News.

How do we interpret this? I sure hope this is DNS lookups. But if so, doesn't it bother anyone else that the Verisign CEO said "53 billion requests for websites" as opposed to "53 billion requests for domain name resolution." God help us if this means 53 billion different DOMAINS; how many of them are Botnet controllers?

I'm just waiting for the sign in front of Verisign HQ, "Over 53 billion websites served every day"...

Re:53 billion websites???

[soliptic]

What are you quibbling about? Did you miss the memo where it was declared that everything you can view, read, listen or interface with on the internet will henceforth be known as a website?

It was in that same memo where we decided to standardise on "download" for all verbs referring to interactions with computers.

Hold on, I'll see if I can find the document on my CPU and then I'll download it to a website for you to check it out yourself.

Re:tomato

[Anonymous Coward]

Tomato, tomato... all made in China.

Domain names suck!

[Anonymous Coward]

As does the government-enforced centralization that makes them possible, making Internet users ever-more dependent on centralized force. The free market would have come up with other ideas for name resolution and the like, with multiple competing authorities (like search engine rankings) and thus multiple points of failure and control - when one becomes tyrannical you'd just switch to an other! A much freer Internet would have emerged without this centralization, and would have been much better, stronger, and more resilient without it!

(Signed: Alex Libman's sock-puppet.)

Re:Symbolics Open Genera?

[Anonymous Coward]

Long story short: if you have tru64 lying around. Instead, try checking this and look at references 23-27. There are lots of emulators for the old hardware + software stacks.

Many defense related

[digitalcowboy]

Just an observation...

A significant proportion of those first 100 are defense contractors or otherwise related to the DOD. That's not a shock; indeed it makes sense. But it jumped out at me.

Re:tomato

[baka_toroi]

A British guy told me off today because I said "to-mate-oh" instead of "to-mah-to." (English is not my native language)
He's such a cigarette.

Coincidence

[suso]

Interesting, I just did a two letter combination scan of the .com TLD today. Yeah, I do that kind of stuff for fun. ;-)

No sex.com?!?

[courteaudotbiz]

Damn, those first Internet geeks are not like today's geeks!

Tandy before Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it humorous that Tandy.com was registered before apple.com.

Old Website

[Lord_Jeremy]

Not sure how true it is, but my Computer Science/Calculus BC teacher claims to have one of the first webpages put up on the internet. I would tend to believe him, as he is quite the CS wiz and he tends to be really current. Although looking at his webpage now I think he just got lazy and didn't feel like updating the layout. In any case it currently resides over at http://calcpage.tripod.com/. As the story goes it started out on a researchers network after a friend at some institute that I forget the name of told him about this crazy new thing called the internet. He's also the most innovative teacher in the school, for what it's worth. He's the only one that manages to make full use of the stuff from SMART Technologies that was just installed, taking video of his lessons recorded from the SMART system so students can catch up.

Crash Telecommunications Services - #62

[calidoscope]

My first ISP was CTS.COM, had an account from 1995-2003. Would still be with them, but they dropped their DSL biz in 2003. What's funny is that the DNS entry for my host still resolves...

Re:tomato

[Anonymous Coward]

tomato

But It's pronounced tomato!

I thnk you actually mean Tomaco!

What does the "g" (in gTLD) denote?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Subj asks it all... if you know the answer, kindly post it in a reply, thanks.

Re:What does the "g" (in gTLD) denote?

[Bambi Dee]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTLD

Re:Symbolics Open Genera?

[Pikoro]

I have a set of tru64 install discs. I also have a few alpha motherboards and CPUs laying around. :) Care to answer the question now?

54. DG.COM

[Peter Simpson]

Yeah!

Those were the good old days...before firewalls...when your desktop workstation has an external IP address.

pyramid.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

What comes up is not The Artist Formerly Known as Pyramid Technology in Mountain View, CA. It's some PC accessory store. Should that really count?

IMPLing...