
Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs - fcambus
https://www.cambus.net/oldest-domains-in-the-com-net-and-org-tlds/
======
joeblau
I worked for bbn.com back in the mid 2000's before they went out of business.
BBN employed some of the smartest people I've ever worked with, but the
company couldn't figure out how to keep the business relationships going. I
remember having a conversation with my colleague saying "How does a company
that invents the internet go out of business?"

I was eventually laid off along with about 30% of the company. I saw people
who worked there for 18 years brought to tears because BBN was all they knew.
My key take away was that experience was that no matter how impactful your
tech company is on society, leadership's vision really determines the
trajectory.

~~~
macintux
I started at BBN a few years before that, a month before the sale to GTE. It
was a shame, they definitely had some tremendously bright people.

I also have on a couple of occasions worked at Eli Lilly, who had a class A
because they were early to the Internet; I found it vaguely humorous that
between BBN and Lilly I'd worked on more class A networks than most people
would ever have the opportunity to.

~~~
jacquesm
192.* and 127.* work just fine ;)

~~~
stock_toaster
192.168.* is only a 16bit rfc-1918 allocation. Perhaps you meant 10.* ?

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invalidusernam3
Top 20:

symbolics.com - Still exists

bbn.com - Redirects to raytheon.com

think.com - Dead

mcc.com - Redirects to thecryptogenius.com (sometimes, not sure what's going
on with it)

dec.com - Redirects to paulkocher.com

northrop.com - Dead

xerox.com - Alive, Xerox website

sri.com - Alive

hp.com - Alive, HP website

bellcore.com - Dead

ibm.com - Alive, IBM website

sun.com - Alive, sun website (oracle.com)

intel.com - Alive, intel website

ti.com - Alive, Texas Instruments

att.com - Alive, ATT

gmr.com - Dead

tek.com - Alive, Tektronix website

fmc.com - Alive, FMC website

ub.com - Alive, United Bitcoin website

bell-atl.com - Dead

~~~
swyx
are single letter domains not allowed? surprised two letter domains are not
more common.

~~~
cbhl
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-
level_dom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain)

tl;dr: IANA reserved all the single-letter domains in 1993, except for some
that had been grandfathered in.

All the two-letter .com domains are registered, and only available on the
secondary market.

~~~
chejazi
There's also single-character punycode domains, e.g. ¢.com which converts to
[http://xn--8a.com](http://xn--8a.com)

------
king_nothing
The oldest domain is still going strong [http://nordu.net](http://nordu.net)

 _NORDUnet is a collaboration between the National Research and Education
Networks (NRENs) of the five Nordic countries; Denmark (DeIC), Iceland
(RHnet), Norway (UNINETT), Sweden (SUNET), and Finland (Funet). The Nordic
region (five countries and three autonomous areas) has a population of 25
million, 9 official languages, and a strong tradition of collaboration.
Together, the countries form the world’s 11th largest economy.

NORDUnet was founded in 1985 as a result of the NORDUNET programme and is
jointly owned by the five Nordic countries. Each of the Nordic NRENs has a
seat on the board and share the base costs according to the country GDP.

NORDUnet operates a world-class network and e-infrastructure service for the
Nordic R&E community. The five NRENs develop and operate the national research
network infrastructures, connecting more than 400 research & education
institutions with more than 1.2 million users._

~~~
pishpash
.net (and .org) used to have more cachet, interesting how these things evolve.

~~~
ianmcgowan
.edu also. I remember when having .com in your email was looked down on. Back
when getting email (via UUCP) was more exciting than getting a letter in the
mail.

My first domain registered was "Creation Date: 1994-06-01T04:00:00Z", and it
was a total pain in the ass, involving certified letters and other nonsense.

------
lispm
For the record: the first .com companies were mostly heavy AI/Lisp users:

Symbolics -> Lisp Machines, Lisp software

BBN -> Jericho Lisp Machine, BBN Lisp, various Lisp applications

Thinking Machines -> Connection Machine CM1, a massive parallel accelerator
for Symbolics Lisp Machine, *Lisp

MCC -> had a network of 100+ Lisp Machines, developed Cyc, Orion (a Lisp OODB)
and a Lisp-based CAD system - amongst others

Xerox -> Interlisp, Interlisp-D Lisp Machine

SRI -> AI research with lots Lisp applications

------
everdev
Were original registrations done by mail?

I see 5 domains registered on Aug. 5th, 1986, then no more domains for another
month. And 12 on Dec. 11 1986, then again another month with no registrations.

~~~
chrissnell
Yes, they were done by email and were a massive pain in the ass. There was a
text file template you'd fill out and email it to ISI. The domains were free
but you had to have working nameservers for them and that was the tough part.
As a young undergrad in 1993, I wanted to register a few but couldn't find
anyone to serve DNS for me. The Vanderbilt IT staff was unwilling to help and
I didn't know anybody else until I met my buddy Bob Collie (who owns bob.net).
I ended up registering cjs.com, grateful.com, eleet.com and some others but
let most of them expire when I couldn't afford the annual $70 per-domain fee
that Network Solutions started charging after they took over from ISI. The
only one I kept was bikeworld.com, which I had registered for my dad's bike
shop. He still uses it today.

~~~
mrbill
Sup, Chris?

I hated having to use the InterNIC template when I was handling domain regs
back at that place we were both involved with.

~~~
roryisok
I love when people on hn know each other.

------
arglebarnacle
In the sea of dead links, early tech companies, think tanks, and so on, I was
happy to see my local (Boston) PBS and NPR affiliate, WGBH. I don't usually
think of public broadcasting as an early tech adopter, so even in Boston it
was a pleasant surprise to see they registered one of the first 100 .org
domains.

------
paulstovell
We have [https://octopus.com](https://octopus.com), which is on the list. And
first registered the year I was born. Has an interesting history:
[http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/text/2011/d2011...](http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/text/2011/d2011-0417.html)

> Respondent Yana Beklova, who at one stage worked for the Complainant,
> requested an amount between USD 500,000 and USD 1,000,000 for the transfer
> of the disputed domain name, that the registrant of the disputed domain name
> sought to hide its identity through a WhoIs privacy protection service, that
> the Respondents tried to transfer the disputed domain name out of the reach
> of the Australian courts to avoid legal proceedings after having received
> the cease and desist letter, that some of the Respondents named by the
> Complainant have been involved in previous UDRP proceedings, which suggests
> a pattern of conduct, and that the disputed domain name was registered to
> intentionally attract customers looking for the Complainant’s website for
> commercial gain by creating a likelihood of confusion.

~~~
drchickensalad
God I love octopus. Thank you for your work!

------
reaperducer
Should also include an .edu list.

IIRC, rice.edu was the 8th domain registered on the entire internet.

~~~
cozzyd
Wikipedia seems to have it [0]. Sad to say, looks like Cal beat Stanford :(

[0]:
[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#.edu)

~~~
kps
I don't believe Wikipedia. The fourth IETF proceedings lists 90 .edu domains
registered as of July 10, 1986.

Of those, 18 are still currently registered but are not in Wikipedia's list:
buffalo.edu colgate.edu du.edu houston.edu lehigh.edu merit.edu mosis.edu
riacs.edu sdsu.edu sunysb.edu tmc.edu ucar.edu uchicago.edu uiowa.edu umb.edu
uoregon.edu villanova.edu vt.edu

A further 7 are no longer registered: mich-state.edu ntsu.edu ogc.edu
pittsburgh.edu ukans.edu wanginst.edu waterloo.edu

~~~
cozzyd
Yeah, it must be based on querying whois, but for example, whois shows that
uchicago.edu was registered in 1991 and northwestern.edu was registered in
1999 (!!). I suppose there may have been some lapse in the registration or
something...

~~~
seandougall
Northwestern used to be nwu.edu, but they rebranded in 1999 (which happened to
be my sophomore year there).

------
ghaff
I wonder what the story is behind nordu.net being the first registered domain
name (I'm assuming it's the same nordu.net that exists today; I don't actually
know although the dates seem to match up.) It is associated with research
networks but it still seems a bit odd that they registered before BBN,
Berkeley, and organizations like those.

~~~
kpil
If i remember correctly, they created the first transatlantic ARPA link in the
first years of proto-internet, so they were there from the beginning, ie
before DNS. Maybe they just stared to use DNS earlier than Berkeley.

They had a rather respectful network in 1993, they probably had been running
for more than 15 years by then.

~~~
ghaff
You learn something new every day. I actually had to look them up. It appears
that they're unique in having registered a domain name on the same day that
DARPA registered the TLDs.

ADDED: I do wonder if the date is fudged a bit. I suppose it's possible that
both DARPA and Nordic network people were hard at work registering things on
New Year's Day but I have my doubts :-)

------
techwizrd
My employer, MITRE, is known for being the first to register a .org TLD. It's
a pretty neat bit of computing history.

~~~
technofiend
Anecdotally they also chased after a consultancy using mitre.com and forced
them to give up their domain. The founders had gone to MIT and Rice University
and were in a completely different sector but MITRE didn't care.

~~~
panzagl
MITRE's not really a consultancy, but I wouldn't call them a completely
unrelated field. Mitre.com now belongs to the soccer ball company so they
couldn't have been too tight-fisted with it.

------
sideproject
Just a side question... how could I have registered a domain name back in the
80's? What was the process back in those days ?

------
VectorLock
Back when .net domains were actually networks.

And seeing fidonet.org brought back a wave of nostalgia.

------
chrisacky
What was registration fees back then? Why wouldn't people just squat on a
bunch of two/three letter domains? Was it prohibitively difficult to
register..

~~~
ant6n
Nobody saw a value in domain names. People didn't think we'd run out of
domains. People didn't think that the internet would become mainstream, or
that it would continue to exist in that form for a long time.

~~~
ghaff
For that matter, /8 blocks were given out, if not quite like candy, certainly
with considerable abandon. A fair number of the early universities and
companies who registered ended up with complete /8 blocks all to themselves.

[EDIT: Duh. Of course, it was actually Class A blocks at the time.]

~~~
icedchai
Class C's were literally given out like candy. I have my own /24, and know
several others who do, as well.

~~~
acuozzo
> Class C's were literally given out like candy.

Are you implying that they were printed out, individually packaged, and
offered in a bowl?

~~~
icedchai
Totally. ;) In all seriousness, I had friends who emailed Internic with fake
company names and their home address. They received a Class C allocation in
about a month.

------
jwn
This must be missing entries. For example, look up ca.com:

created: 1985-01-01

Making it 2 months older than the earliest dot com on the list.

~~~
monkeynotes
I got: ca.com > Creation Date: 1996-02-09T05:00:00Z

~~~
jwn
Well that's strange. The company was founded in 1976, so it was certainly
plausible that they would be an early domain registration, but 1996 wouldn't
qualify as that!

I wonder why you got a different date back?

~~~
ghaff
If you do a whois, there is a: created: 1985-01-01

string in the record (along with the 1996 date), so it's a bit confusing.

~~~
icedchai
That 1985-01-01 is when .COM itself (TLD) was created.

~~~
ghaff
Ah, OK. Got it. Thanks.

------
gnufx
I'm surprised no-one has pointed out that many UK academic addresses
effectively remain from the days of SRCNET/SERCNET -- I forget when it changed
-- in the early '80s, and possibly late '70s. It's just that they've changed
from the NRS big-endian scheme (as IP addresses) to DNS little-endian, i.e.
liv.ac.uk now, instead of uk.ac.liv where I started. (There was a long and
short form of most names, so uk.ac.liv and uk.ac.liverpool were equivalent.)
Much confusion between, e.g., cs as computer science and Czechoslovakia in the
period when both endians were allowed...

------
matt_wulfeck
Checks one from the 90's:

> _This Site Is Under Construction and Coming Soon._

I won't hold my breath!

------
triviatise
I had ign.org registered in the 1994 timeframe. Don't know why I let it lapse!

------
rconti
Lots of business and org names are acronyms, but it really stands out to me
how most of the early ones are short. I guess in the age of excessively-long
UUCP addresses, it was immediately obvious that short domain names would be
preferable to longer ones.

~~~
reaperducer
Makes sense since they were probably registered by the computer people, not
the marketing people.

Back then (and to a lesser extent now), people tried to make commonly-typed
commands as short as possible because keyboards were so beefy, and finger
fatigue wasn't uncommon.

It's why the core Unix shell commands are things like "cp," instead of "copy."

~~~
acuozzo
> It's why the core Unix shell commands are things like "cp," instead of
> "copy."

This has a lot more to do with how slow the ASR-33 teletype was/is.

------
ksec
Given how many people / media say we are entering an App world, are domain
name still worth a lot of money?

I waited for .Web I think for now close or over a decade? And it doesn't seems
to be coming despite all the silly Tld we have now.

------
Bromskloss
It's funny that several of the top ones on the lists use light blue colours
prominently. For a moment, I wondered if some of them had been collected and
were run by a single organisation.

------
mc32
I had thought two letter TLDs weren’t allowed till the mid 90s... but this
shows they were allowed from the beginning. Maybe I’m thinking single
alphanumeric domains.

------
oaiey
I am surprised by the number of funny/visionary domains. Broken.net, super.org
or portal.com as part of these lists is funny.

------
cobbzilla
trivial thing I noticed: eff.org predates fsf.org by ~3 months. must have been
a fun time to be at the genesis of so much.

------
apexalpha
On this note: in 1986 the .nl became official being the first country domain
outside of the US with: www.cwi.nl

------
skilic
Is there a way to check the date a specific domain was registered?

------
TigerHimself
Is there a free and unlimited Whois query ?

------
gwbas1c
intel.com is there... microsoft.com isn't.

------
vwcx
Anyone remember AOL Keywords?

------
invalidusernam3
Crazy to think the oldest domain is 12 days older than me (registered
1985-03-15)

~~~
donohoe
Are you sure? I thought is was nordu.net from 1985-01-01

------
bobmagoo
That's really interesting data! I threw up a quick viz of the data:
[https://public.tableau.com/profile/braxtone7168#!/vizhome/Ea...](https://public.tableau.com/profile/braxtone7168#!/vizhome/Earliest100Domains/Earliest100RegisteredDomainsbyTLD)

