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Oldest Dot-com Domain Turning 30
netbuzz writes: On March 15, 1985, Symbolics, Inc, maker of Lisp computers, registered the Internet's first dot-com address: Symbolics.com. Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of that registration. And while Symbolics has been out of business for years, the address was sold in 2009 for an undisclosed sum to a speculator who said: "For us to own the first domain is very special to our company, and we feel blessed for having the ability to obtain this unique property." Today there's not much there.
bbn.com was registered 9 days later - still around, doing the same thing - government sponsored research.
Number 7 on the list of oldest registered domain names.
BBN is apparently owned by Raytheon.
Apple.com is number 64, just under two years later. One of the benefits of getting in on the ground floor like that was big blocks of IPv4 addresses - apple.com still controls a /24 block, I think.
When did microsoft.com get created?
My personal intro to the internet was at the University of Maryland - I was there when the TAC to Ft. Meade was installed.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
It's not that long. Even before this registering of the domain, the "internet" was already underway. What the registering did was provide a common name that everyone could agree upon so that you didn't have to use the IP address directly and you could use DNS so that you didn't have to enter all your favorites into the hosts table.
Also symbolics.com was NOT the first domain. First registrations were darpa.org/darpa.net/darpa.gov and nordu.net. Not only was nordu.net there on the first day, it is also the oldest domain that is still active. For the next registration after symbolics.com, there was bbn.com on the same day as several .EDU domains. The .EDU domains far outnumbered .COM domains during 1985, which makes sense because the internet was highly academic in nature, and even the early commercial domains were primarily using it in their research divisions.
I found it odd that when searching for this list (it's on wikipedia) that I easily found several other hits that listed only the early .COM domains and it took a lot more digging to find hits listing all the early domains. But I guess that in the modern era that only for-profit commercial companies matter to the mass media and general public.
Everyone gets this wrong.
BIND was written at Digital when Brian Reid looked at Mockapetris spec and got Vixie to take the Berkeley B-Tree code and produce BIND.
Now what do you suppose the chances are that he didn't bother to grab digital.com? How bout zero? If you guessed that, you deserve a cookie.
Reid has the nic receipt for digital.com and it predates symbolics.com. February vs. March, NSI screwed up the dates in one of their transitions.
Ref: Brian Reid. Ask him yourself. This was explained on one of the domain mailing lists during the DNS wars.
Need Mercedes parts ?