
The 100 oldest .com domains on the internet - amerf1
http://theforrester.wordpress.com/2007/08/13/the-100-oldest-domains-on-the-internet/
======
acheron
Interesting if you haven't seen it before, but that blog post is kind of
terrible. (Calling them "WWW" domains? In 1985?)

Wikipedia has the list too, along with the corresponding domains in .org,
.net, etc.:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names)

~~~
ctdonath
With the dominance of the WWW now, most people don't realize the Internet (and
the ".com" nomenclature) predates the WWW.

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joeblau
I worked at BBN (#2) for 2.5 Years right when I graduated from college. Genius
level colleagues; The types of guys that would download computer viruses and
decompile them "Just to look at the code."

A funny story is when they called me for an interview, my Mom said "It's BB&T
on the line." and my response was "I bank with Bank Of America." Then she said
"Just take the call!"

~~~
JonFish85
Not to be confused with BB&N, the private school just down the street from
it...

~~~
pivo
That did confuse me for years. I thought there were a bunch of child prodigies
working for BBN.

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mmccaff
This list makes the rounds every year or so, but I always like seeing it; one
of the domains is a special one to me, although I was not there at the time it
was registered. UniPress Software (unipress.com, #80 on the list) was my first
job while in college in the late 90s, and gave me the ~14 year experience of
creating a product that went through all of the stages from "figuring out if
people want a web-based application that does ___" to being a grown up,
enterprise software that was acquired by a very large company. The two
founders had real software-startup instinct before startup/entrepreneur was
something written about, a love for what it is that we do, and are still close
friends. It was a great place to be, a great time, and awesome people to be
around. The two founders reached the age of retirement and sold the company
years ago, but have been involved in two startups since, just because it's
what they like. It makes sense that they would have bought a domain when it
was a "pioneer" thing to do.

Most recently, seeing that Twitter was becoming very popular, Mark had been
pumping out PHP code using CodeIgniter and made www.mediaroost.com in his
spare time, a Twitter Management platform. It didn't take off, he retired it,
but had a good time. Going way back, this is the same guy who wrote C
compilers and sold Whitesmiths Ltd which released the first commercial C
compiler.

(and going back before my time again, but interesting history - UniPress had
also purchased Gosling Emacs which then became UniPress Emacs, controversially
asking Richard Stallman to stop distributing GNU emacs source code.)

~~~
SimHacker
YOU EVIL SOFTWARE HOARDER!!!!

Ha ha, just joking. ;) I worked for UniPress too, on Emacs. There was a
certain professional animosity between Stallman and UniPress. Stallman had a
justifiable axe to grind against UniPress, which he expressed by calling
UniPress "Evil Software Hoarders".

But between the individual people, it was more like the relationship between
the cartoon sheepdog and the coyote, that was friendly and respectful after
everyone had punched out of work.

Just after RMS's house had burned down, Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" and I were
wandering around a science fiction convention and ran into RMS (who is a
fixture in the east coast SF con scene). Mike sincerely asked him, "Richard, I
heard a terrible rumor that your house had burnt down. Is that true?" To which
RMS replied without missing a beat, "Yes, but where you work, you must have
heard about it in advance."

We all had a great laugh from that -- RMS is a very funny guy who's quick on
his feet, with a sharp sense of humor! Just don't let him get under your skin,
like when you post a baby announcement to a mailing list for arranging dinner
get-togethers on the other side of the country than he lives:
[http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-
doctor.html](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html)

Here's an old picture of JSOL, RMS, Liz and Mike, where RMS is holding a
gerbil wrapped in duct tape, about to ask, "I don't know, why do you wrap
gerbils in duct tape?" (Now you can ask google if you really want to know...)
[http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-
liz-m...](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-liz-mg.jpg)

------
mtkd
Sat with a fellow student at 3am in a UMIST lab in early 90s. Trying to
resolve 'levi.com', 'cocacola.com' etc. on some early rev Mosaic ... rarely
find a registered brand ... "someone needs to make page with a list of ones
that work" ... go back to COBOL project.

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BMorearty
There was no web in 1985.

But there was an Internet. Companies registered domains for email addresses,
FTP servers, etc.

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leokun
There's gotta be a way to create a site where you can catch up on stuff that
is often resubmitted to reddit and HN (and even digg!). I don't know how one
can do that without human moderators or expensive and difficult AI.

People who have never seen this list before find it interesting. People who
have been on reddit and HN see it every other month. Some way to please both
groups so everyone is happy would be nice.

~~~
inafewwords
Reddit has related links that no one uses. There is also a comment bot that
finds reports. AI looks for Similar titles and site links. It's more
complicated when trying to tailor it to a persons history. Digg and reddit
have tried AI frontpage customization by history, but idk if it was ever to
bring new people to catch up on old posts.

Facebook sort of did it with old posts randomly coming up on the side to
trigger nostalgia I guess.

Taking into account vote history, you can tumble through old popular posts not
similar to anything voted on yet. Maybe push it out to groups of people who
haven't seen it to keep the comments and discussions to thrive.

Can use the API to gather the needed info

~~~
leokun
> Taking into account vote history, you can tumble through old popular posts
> not similar to anything voted on yet. Maybe push it out to groups of people
> who haven't seen it to keep the comments and discussions to thrive.

I like this. Also instead of a related link, just show the related things. And
maybe stack overflow style user moderation.

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adamb_
This is a TED talk by the creator of think.com:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_cra...](http://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_crash_we_need_a_plan_b.html)

He touches on his early realization that he could have taken a ton of domain
names & made some money, but that would have gone against the spirit of the
internet at that time (i.e. don't take more than you need.)

------
danso
Sad to see that "think.com" is so underused. Oracle would do well by me to
donate it to one of the many educational initiatives for use today (think.com
resolves to this
[http://www.thinkquest.org/en/](http://www.thinkquest.org/en/))

Recently I went looking at the registration for love.com, but that was a
relative newbie, being registered in 1998. How did it take so long for someone
to snatch that up? (sadly, that too is being wasted by a corporation: AOL)

~~~
simonswords82
Totally agree. It's a shame there isn't a rule in place whereby domains need
to be used or handed back.

~~~
dfox
Problem with such rule is how would you define "used domain". For example I
own one domain whose almost sole purpose is that it is part of package name in
few Java systems written 10 years ago (and few hostnames belonging to that
domain are in configuration of who knows how many things).

~~~
rz2k
With real estate property taxes encourage an efficient distribution of
resources. The domain fees could increase, however it would be difficult to
assess the value of a domain for a property that is so nonfungible that it is
only valuable to the company that has a made up word as its name.

------
iMark
This reminds me of a book published, back in the early 90's that contained a
list of every public email address on the internet. It was smaller than the
average phone book.

I imagine an updated edition would be a little larger. Or have really tiny
type...

------
wodow
So why was Symbolics first?

~~~
ghaff
It was an MIT AI Lab spinoff which helps explain why it was early. As to why
it was earlier than, say, BBN though I have no idea.

~~~
yardie
BBN has an entire /8 for itself at 4.0.0.0. I'm sure whoever made that
decision saw there were maybe a dozen addresses and figured, "whats the point?
people can reach us at 4.3.2.1."

------
DanielBMarkham
Interesting to compare this list to the current Fortune 500 list to get a list
of companies that were first on the net and also managed to stay very
profitable over the last couple of decades.

Just from a glance, looks like IBM and AT&T made both lists. I'm sure there
are others.

~~~
antidaily
Northrop.

------
teh_klev
Previous occurrences/discussion of same thing here:

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=oldest+domains...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=oldest+domains&start=0)

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farico
Anybody got older snapshot?

[http://web.archive.org/web/19981207002851/http://stony-
brook...](http://web.archive.org/web/19981207002851/http://stony-
brook.scrc.symbolics.com/www/index.html)

~~~
agumonkey
[http://web.archive.org/web/20031206082643/http://stony-
brook...](http://web.archive.org/web/20031206082643/http://stony-
brook.scrc.symbolics.com/www/index.html)

this one is the latest worthy snapshot

------
e13tra
The Wayback Machine let me down again. Until I waybacked the Wayback Machine.

------
scrrr
Interesting that some companies really advertise on the oldest domain,
[http://symbolics.com](http://symbolics.com). (Or it's fake so others want to
advertise, too.)

~~~
ambiate
An aged domain typically has higher page rank. I imagine it has a ton of
backlinks from just existing in that time. Companies pay for its page rank to
be funneled into them by association.

~~~
e13tra
Looks like it's someone pretty excited to have it:
[http://symbolics.com/about-symbolics/](http://symbolics.com/about-symbolics/)

------
MattBearman
As someone who was being born when those domains were being registered, can
anyone shed some light onto what the internet was like back then? (my
understanding is that there wasn't a www back then)

~~~
username42
I finished my studies in 1993 and I have used internet a lot during the 3 last
years (mid 1990 until mid 1993). ncsa mosaic has really arrived in my school
only at the beginning of 1994, after I left.

During my studies, the main internet tools were telnet and ftp. There was no
firewall and it was really easy to connect to any computer anywhere. It was
also really easy to find password (ypcat passwd then dictionary based
attacks). My girlfriend was in another school (500km away) and I was using a
small utility named xhtalk to monitor when she was connected in order to chat
with her. With xarchie, you could search a software or game by its name and it
returned an anonymous ftp server.

I played go on internet using igs in 1992. There was something similar for
chess.

The main information source was the newsgroups. There was already hyperlink
navigation with gopher.

The version of linux on my PC was 0.99 (version of the kernel). I was using it
mainly as an X server to access the school computers when the rooms were
closed.

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tocomment
Has anyone gotten in early on namecoin domain names? There are still a lot
available when I checked. Unfortunately the process seemed really complex so I
kind of gave up for now. Any thoughts?

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binocarlos
Ha - #69 = my first name - kai.com - registered by Intel - I guess they are
looking after it for me : )

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DeadJim
I recommend not visiting symbolic.com. Tacky advertising and nothing else.

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tuananh
IBM, HP, Apple, Intel are right there. I didn't see Microsoft though.

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PLenz
The oldest item on that list is one day older then I am...

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snake_plissken
dig @new.toad.com toad.com -t AXFR

wutttttt

