

The oldest .com domain names - amdixon
http://www.domainholdings.com/recent-sales/100-oldest-domain-names/

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fps
This is more accurately the 100 oldest .com domains - Wikipedia's list
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names))
includes the list for the other TLDs. For example, it looks like 5 .edu
domains were added at the same time as bbn.com was on April 24, 1985.

~~~
mhandley
Even that list is incomplete, as it misses the country-code domains. For
example, ucl.ac.uk was in DNS sometime in mid 1985
([http://domainincite.com/2657-was-this-the-first-ever-uk-
doma...](http://domainincite.com/2657-was-this-the-first-ever-uk-domain)) But
DNS registration wasn't the beginning of domain names - before DNS there was
hosts.txt and some "new-style" domain names found their way in there before
DNS.

This document ftp://ftp.maths.tcd.ie/src/mail/mmdf-Maths/doc/auth.ps from
April 1985 by Steve Kille at UCL includes a server log (page 5) that lists
hosts in cambridge.ac.uk, rsre.ac.uk, ukc.ac.uk, and rutherford.ac.uk in use
all before the domain names were registered in DNS.

Disclaimer: I've had the same cs.ucl.ac.uk email address since I was a student
in Sept 1985. Now I'm feeling old.

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

:grouchface:

~~~
JohnTHaller
Oh you mean 2 years after I taught myself to program on a Commodore 64 hooked
up to a black and white TV in my bedroom? #getoffmylawn

~~~
nkozyra
At 35 I'm not sure I qualify for greybeard status (perhaps relatively), but
when you write something like this is there some illusion that everyone
reading a tech piece is under 25?

~~~
TillE
Even that wouldn't make sense here, because then it would be "before you were
born" rather than "before you knew...".

I'd hope that anyone writing about tech would be aware of the significance of
the C64, Apple IIe, etc.

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jordanpg
Definitely check out the rather weird site at the oldest domain name in the
list: [http://symbolics.com/](http://symbolics.com/)

~~~
tsuru
Unfortunately the original was much more hacker friendly and awesome. Lisp
Machines! They sold it off several years ago and now live here:
[http://www.symbolics-dks.com/](http://www.symbolics-dks.com/)

~~~
JasonFruit
And that site is downright embarrassing. It reminds me of the way a very
different but still excellent kind of older software, Delphi, went after it
lost steam and was sold off by Borland: it went to people who milked it for
all it was worth while putting as little into it as possible.

~~~
tsuru
my "awesome" referenced more of the product they were selling than the website
they were/are running. But yes, they lost to Unix / AI winter and all the
money dried up.

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lispm
Basically all the early ones were Lisp companies:

* Symbolics, Lisp Machines

* BBN, Jericho Lisp Machine running Interlisp, lot's of applied AI stuff - BBN also did a lot of other things

* Thinking Machines, _Lisp on the Connection Machine

_ MCC, Research Center with a hundred Lisp Machines used for research in AI
(Cyc), chip design, object oriented databases (ORION), ...

* Xerox: Lisp Machine

* SRI: AI research

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arihant
Given that this list spans a little over two years, I'm surprised to see no
microsoft.com, all the other tech giants at the time are pretty much in here.

~~~
hudell
Well, people say Microsoft didn't think internet was a big deal back on the
day.

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ca98am79
Why does #45 have a space in it? "Data IO.com" If you look up dataio.com, it
says the creation date is October 10, 1997:

[http://who.is/whois/dataIO.com](http://who.is/whois/dataIO.com)

I assume this is a typo? Or could domains have spaces in them back then?

EDIT: I see from the wikipedia page it is actually "data-io.com"

~~~
jgeorge
Creation dates are from the most recent domain creation record, and can be
reset from a domain ownership transfer. I lost my precious domain creation
date of September 1993 when I transfered my domain from the ISP who registered
it /in their own name/ (argh) to my own ownership in 1998.

~~~
ca98am79
wow, 1993 - what domain?

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talles
A shame to see think.com redirecting to
[http://www.oracle.com/splash/thinkquest/down-189973.html](http://www.oracle.com/splash/thinkquest/down-189973.html),
which is broken by the way.

think.com is a great domain name...

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zwieback
Glad to see we (HP) have a pretty old one and we have DEC as well, I'm
guessing we're the biggest holder of class A addresses. Now we're splitting so
it'll be interesting to see how that gets distributed.

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sprkyco
There are some real gems in there. mentat.com and then there's entity.com a
resume of sorts for Marty Connor who is now apparently the Corporate
Operations Engineer at Google.

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niix
Pretty interesting. Number 49 (Tandy), brings back some nostalgia. Tandy was
the first computer I had growing up and the first machine I learn to program
on.

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jnorthrop
I have to appreciate that I never stood a chance of getting the .com domain of
my last name. It is #6 on the list.

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bonzoq
Symptomatic Microsoft's domain is not on this list. Looks like they missed the
internet revolution.

~~~
dbarlett
Yes, famously. Bill Gates sent his "Internet Tidal Wave" memo in 1995 and
admitted they were behind:

    
    
      Some competitors have a much deeper involvement in the Internet than
      Microsoft. All UNIX vendors are benefiting from the Internet since the
      default server is still a UNIX box and not Windows NT, particularly for
      high end demands, SUN has exploited this quite effectively.
      [...]
      Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats. After 10
      hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows
      .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format.
      [...]
      A new competitor “born” on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is
      dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network
      extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where
      they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating
      system.
    

[1] [http://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-
memo/al...](http://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/all/)

------
danvoell
I find adobe.com really interesting. What were they doing back then?

~~~
itafroma
> I find adobe.com really interesting. What were they doing back then?

Adobe was founded by ex-Xerox PARC employees, so perhaps not surprisingly
their first couple of successes were printing related: PostScript and Type 1
fonts in 1982 and 1984, respectively. By 1986 they were working in desktop
publishing with the development of Illustrator.

