

Oldest Domain Names - pjvds
http://www.domainholdings.com/recent-sales/100-oldest-domain-names/

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binarymax
[http://symbolics.com/](http://symbolics.com/) is just absolutely absurd now.
Audi and Atari advertising next to a work from home scam, a domain name
lawyer, a religious university, and a smattering of other random entities.

Somewhat ironically the first domain now just reflects the absolute nature of
of the web itself.

~~~
larrys
What bothers you about that exactly?

(I know the owner of that domain and he's actually a nice honorable guy).

He paid for it in order to have the first (per my other comment) domain. What
do you think should happen a plaque be put on it as is done with important
physical real estate?

------
R_Edward
"Domain names have been actually been available for 28 years – yes, before you
even knew what a computer looked like."

Guess I'm not part of domainholdings's target audience. I've been programming
computers for 33 years. So no, not before I even knew what a computer looked
like.

But man, how much money would I have, had I snapped up as many
www.<fortune500companyname>.com domains as I could, and sold them to the
companies as they became internet-aware!

~~~
rafaelm
You probably would have made zero money as the companies would have filed a
trademark / wipo dispute and taken the domains.

I would have registered a bunch of generic domains, like business.com or
sex.com (lookup the history of that domain for an interesting read.)

~~~
thenmar
A lot of people did exactly this!

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crazygringo
Wait, every single name here is a .com. I thought the Internet was non-
commercial at first -- where are the .edu, .org, etc.? Did those not come
until later, or is this list restricted?

~~~
footpath
Those can be found here:

[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)

~~~
hansjorg
> The web site for NORDUNet, nordu.net, is the oldest active domain name. It
> was registered on January 1, 1985.

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jere
I had no clue domains were available before I was born... that's quite a
strange thought. For some reason, I was thinking they wouldn't have been
around before the web.

A dumb question, but what exactly would you do with a domain name before 1990?
Email is all I can think of.

~~~
alextingle
The web is just port 80 (& 443). There are 65533 other ports out there, not to
speak of whole other protocols such as UDP - what are _they_ used for?

Just look at the first dozen or so lines of /etc/services and you'll get a
very good picture of what services were important in the early Internet.

~~~
larrys
"The web is just port 80"

That's actually a really good important point.

Most people wrongly equate a domain not having a web page at port 80 with
"it's not being used".

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cmbaus
Seeing Adobe as one of the oldest domain names is disappointing. They were
perfectly positioned to take advantage of the growth of they internet, but
were never able to capitalize. The company has really stagnated in the past 15
years.

~~~
blumkvist
huh? From where I'm sitting adobe looks strong as fuck. Advertising,
analytics, publishing. They don't have CRM (yet), but it seems like a very
strong b2b company to me.

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sionronin
What was registering a domain name like in 1986-87?

~~~
creeble
They were free, and only took a letter (not email...) to the internic. I
remember when we registered Autodesk.com, not much impact at the time because
we didn't have a connection to the 'net yet. My email was still
{gatech,uunet,MIT}!acad!eric.

~~~
nasalgoat
I registered one via a phone call in 1994. It was just one guy doing them all.

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jonnathanson
How many of these have been in continuous ownership since first being
registered? I'm sure quite a few of them have, but I'd be curious. (For
example, I'd have a hard time believing that "Marble.com" is the same entity
today that it was 30 years ago, and WhoIs info goes back only so far).

~~~
ethomson
Interesting question. I'm relatively certain that cayman.com, for example, was
Cayman Systems, so that has obviously turned over. But many of these companies
(and thus, domains) have simply been acquired. SCO.com was SCO who was once a
legitimate company. kai.com was Kuck and Associates, acquired by Intel's
compiler group several years ago.

The big surprise to me is that they're not all just tech companies. In a sea
of domain names that built the internet sits... Alcoa!?

~~~
jonnathanson
_" The big surprise to me is that they're not all just tech companies. In a
sea of domain names that built the internet sits... Alcoa!?"_

Yeah, Alcoa is an interesting case. On the surface, one wonders why an
aluminum manufacturer would be on the early domains list. But Alcoa _has_ been
(and still is?) in the fabrication business for a wide range of industrial
uses: aerospace, defense, etc. Since the early internet was largely subsidized
by the military-industrial complex, it makes _some_ sense that a major
supplier would be early on the bandwagon.

That's just a guess, though. I have no particular knowledge of why Alcoa was
there early.

~~~
rhplus
If your business feeds a global commodities market, then you're probably going
to want some advanced telecoms to keep up with pricing, supply chains, and all
those mines and processing plants in far flung corners of the globe.

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cafard
Wow. Just at a glance, three minicomputer companies that have since vanished:
DEC, DG, Prime. On the UNIX side, Sun and SCO, for mainframes Amdahl.

But I remember well downloading stuff from gatekeeper.dec.com.

~~~
jlgaddis
> But I remember well downloading stuff from gatekeeper.dec.com.

Wow, you just gave my flashbacks... metalab, sunsite, ftp.cdrom.com, ...

And not sure why this one just popped into my mind as it's totally unrelated
to any of those: the Internet Oracle
[http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/index.cgi](http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/index.cgi)

------
StephenFalken
It's curious to note that the very first domain registration on any gTLD came
from NORDUnet [1], precisely at the first day after the public launching of
the _Domain Name System_ , back in Jan 1, 1985. [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORDUnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORDUnet)

[2]
[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#.net)

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IgorPartola
Why are there so many of them that share dates of registration?

~~~
bradleyjg
Probably because Jon Postal batched up requests and entered them all at the
same time, rather than entering them as soon as the requests came in.

~~~
eli
If I recall you used to have to fax a form in on company letterhead to confirm
your domain registration.

~~~
nasalgoat
You had to have an actual server providing services for that domain as well -
and back then, that meant at least one physical machine per domain.

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kilroy123
Why was stargate.com registered in August 5, 1986, and what was that for? The
movie and show didn't come out for another 9-10 years.

~~~
columbo
It's a pretty common sci-fi term and books have been named it as early as
1958.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_(disambiguation)?1=1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_\(disambiguation\)?1=1)

~~~
stormbrew
The most notable use that comes to mind for me is that in the 2001: A Space
Odyssey book the monolith around Saturn is called a stargate.

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larrys
This is actually correct only for .com. There are other extensions with old
"domain names" (Like .edu .org .mil etc.)

For example berkeley.edu dates to 1985 as does harvard.edu, mit.edu etc.

Domain Name: BERKELEY.EDU

    
    
       Registrar: EDUCAUSE
    
       Whois Server: whois.educause.net
    
       Referral URL: http://www.educause.edu/edudomain
    
       Name Server: ADNS1.BERKELEY.EDU
    
       Name Server: ADNS2.BERKELEY.EDU
    
       Name Server: AODNS1.BERKELEY.EDU
    
       Name Server: AODNS2.BERKELEY.EDU
    
       Name Server: NS.V6.BERKELEY.EDU
    
       Name Server: PHLOEM.UOREGON.EDU
    
       Name Server: SNS-PB.ISC.ORG
    
       Status: ok
    
       Updated Date: 28-may-2013
    
       Creation Date: 24-apr-1985
    
       Expiration Date: 24-apr-2014
    

Additionally, the list doesn't take into account that if a domain is deleted
and re-registered the creation date reflects the re-registration date.

So a domain registered at the start (say
[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt) by
Jon Postel) that was dropped and re-registered would reflect the newer date.

So this is more accurately "100 Oldest continuously registered .com domain
names". (Note it also doesn't take into account ownership changes)

------
IvyMike
> Domain names were free until 1995.

Is this really true? My memory says differently, as I remember being in
college 1993/1994 and having discussions about the economics of speculatively
purchasing domain names. And the economics were certainly not "free".

But I don't have a source I can site.

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rickmatt
It's funny how Bell Atlantic has the 20th oldest domain name ... and they put
a hyphen in it.

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Ellipsis753
Where domain names case sensitive then? Names such as "Bell-ATL.com" are
listed which use capitals as they please. Is this just so we can recognize the
company name more easily or are they actually registered like that?

~~~
bandy
No, domain names have always been case-insensitive, just like e-mail
addresses.

~~~
jobigoud
E-mail addresses _are_ case sensitive.

~~~
kahirsch
Theoretically, this could be true. Are there any email systems that are
actually case-sensitive?

~~~
slaven
Yes, a lot of older systems (non-Unix) were case sensitive.

~~~
bandy
I'm going to guess Notes was one of them, but do you have any specific
examples? (Unix™-derived e-mail systems being case-insensitive (although, I'd
wager that /bin/mail was case-sensitive back in 7th Edition) is obvious, and I
just checked our Exchange here on campus and it, too, cares not about the case
of my recipient address.)

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TwistedWeasel
No Microsoft.com? Late to the party?

~~~
wiml
Microsoft took quite a while to start paying attention to this hippie /
academic Internet thing. They were pretty late to the party.

~~~
nisse72
Of course, when they decided to release "Internet Explorer for Unix" (IIRC,
for SunOS and HPUX) in about 1997, coming late didn't prevent them from
marketing it with a widely ridiculed phrase along the lines of "Bringing the
Internet to Unix".

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hebleb
Interesting that think.com is owned by Oracle instead of IBM

~~~
rbabich
think.com used to be Thinking Machines. When they folded, their data-mining
software business was sold off to Oracle, along with the domain:

[http://www.informationweek.com/oracle-buys-data-mining-
techn...](http://www.informationweek.com/oracle-buys-data-mining-technology-
from/6511171)

------
marincounty
The Domain Industry needs an enema. I would like to see all those old free
domains, that aren't trademarks, or being used actively raffled off--and not
to the highest bidder. Just an old fashioned raffle to anyone who owns a
website.

