The First 100 Dot Coms Ever Registered

roman1 submitted an interesting list containing the first 100 .com domains registered. Many of the names you haven't heard of, many you have. What was interesting to me is that it took 2 years just to get 100 domains on-line.

Why?

What was interesting to me is that it took 2 years just to get 100 domains on-line.

Why is that interesting? I'm not even sure if this 'internet' thing is going to catch on ...

Re:Why?

I noticed StarGate, and of course also the first ever (rather poorly spelled) porn site - siemens.com! Those guys obviously had great vision for the future, and from their lowly porn business beginnings, they must have managed to start a decent electronics company!

Re:Why?

In 1985 it would have been hard to envision the 'net as we know it now. It was nearly 10 years before the general public would discover the web. Why were these companies bothering? Mostly just for professional collaboration via telnet or ftp, right?

Symbolics ...

... here is some pictures of a symbolics (those with the first domasin) machine for those who cannot imagine ...

http://home.hakuhale.net/rbc/symbolics/20041113/20041113.html [hakuhale.net]

CC.

Re:Symbolics ...

Symbolics wasn't actually first, DEC was. Brian Reid registered it in January (and still has the datestamped mail from the Internic) but they screwed up the dates in whois.

Mitre.org was the fitst domain registered.

Re:Symbolics ...

Symbolics was basically out of business in about 1988. (A very small, as in no more than 2 full time people, company of that name existed until a year or two ago, but all they did with hardware was to maintain what had been manufactured by the original Symbolics.) 2004 is simply the year these photos were taken.

You're right that the very first models -- the LM-2 and 3600 -- were refrigerator-sized, but it wasn't long before they also started building some smaller models. The 3640 was very roughly 20"w x 30"h x 36"d, and the 3610/3620, which used gate arrays, was about 10"w x 24"h x 30"d -- this is the model pictured in the center and center-right photos on that page. Finally, there was the Ivory chip, which powered the MacIvory coprocessor card (this is what's being shown in the upper left photo) and the XL and UX series. I still have a working XL-1200; it's about the size of two Sun "pizza boxes" stacked vertically, maybe 16" x 16" x 8"h. I believe this machine was out in 1987.

(All dimensions guesstimated from memory -- figure a 20% margin of error.)

I remember when....

One of my very first introductions to enterprise networking and internet was back in about 1988. I was friends with the admin of a Vax cluster at a progressive little company. He had printed out "the host table" that he downloaded each night. It probably wasn't more than 80 or 100 sheets of fanfold greenbar. I remember browsing it a bit and the only two that I can remember were burlingtoncoatfactory.com and lucasarts.com (or was it lucasfilms?)

anyway....get off my lawn!

Re:I remember when....

You know the problem with people who have been around technology for a long time is when they go senile, their babble will change but most people probably won't be able to tell the difference.

Re:I remember when....

You know the problem with people who have been around technology for a long time is when they go senile, their babble will change but most people probably won't be able to tell the difference

Why you young insensitive clod, I'm gonna sma.....ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz whut?

Internet connections

Yea it took two years, but these where internet connections. Most companies where not thinking about connecting there computers to the outside world unless they where doing some research or involved with networking in some way. There was not let's put out our "Marketing message on the Internet", most of it was he we where working with this in School and we could use this technology to share information or for sending email.

-S

Re:Internet connections

It's not like they went to the Yahoo! Small Business website and registered the domains on their credit cards for $7.99.

Whoever was maintaining the canonical copy of the hosts file had plenty of other stuff to do, this was just a minor chore for them. So it's reasonable to think that updates would get bunched up and made whenever he happened to have some free time.

Re:Internet connections

It was free for a long time. Then they started charging a one-time administration fee (the amount of which I've long since forgotten). And finally we came to the annual-fee arrangement in place now.

Let's keep things in context

Remember that this took place during the time frame of the transition from a research oriented network (the ARPANET) to a larger, more production oriented network. The World Wide Web in it's current form had not even been invented yet. The creation of the .com domain was driven by a technical requirement to switch to a hierarchical based system, replacing a flat name space. The first step was to adopt the temporary .arpa domain name. Most companies then switched from the .arpa domain to the .com domain when their technical staff was ready to make the transition.

In other words, registering for a .com domain was an administrative necessity for the relatively small number of companies that were connected to the DARPA Internet at that time. It was not a business decision.

Putting this in context, during this same time frame lot of universities were connected to a different network, called CSNET. BITNET was also very active during this period. Although there were interconnections between the DARPA Internet, CSNET, and BITNET, each was a truly independent network. A lot of companies with Unix installations were on UUCP (which did not use a domain based name system).

Considering the market segments that companies like Microsoft were involved with in the mid 1980's, it should not surprise anyone that they were not among the first to register for .com domains. It would not have made any sense for them to do so.

Re:Let's keep things in context

Considering the market segments that companies like Microsoft were involved with in the mid 1980's, it should not surprise anyone that they were not among the first to register for .com domains. It would not have made any sense for them to do so.

As compared to Apple, a massive old-school defense contractor that's only recently transitioned from nuclear guidance systems to MP3 players.

Re:Let's keep things in context

As compared to Apple, a massive old-school defense contractor that's only recently transitioned from nuclear guidance systems to MP3 players.

"Hi, I'm a 900 megaton thermonuclear device capable of turning the entire Soviet Union into a glass parking lot at the push of a button."
"And I'm a PC!"

Re:Let's keep things in context

And once the Marketing Types found out about domain names, they were determined to turn it back into a flat namespace, ignoring subdomains and top-level domains other than .com.

First virtual real-estate goldrush

The registering and selling-on of domain names in the mid-to-late 90's made some serious money for a few brave entrepreneurs. sex.com [wikipedia.org] is the classic case, although early domain-name squatting on big business names brought in easy bucks for some.

This was the 80s

1985, first domain. I'm fairly sure a few posting here weren't even born, most of the rest had other things on their mind than DNS problems (my main concerns was that I was going to a different school then and had to find new friends).

The internet was but a dream. It was something that a few research companies, some universities and maybe even the ARPA cared about. Nobody had internet at home. If anything, we had modems to dial into BBSs.

Does it make sense to register a COM domain? As in Commercial?

Some companies realized that this will be the future (and I'm honestly surprised to see Siemens on the list, they must've had better and more visionary people in their upper echelons back then), and they registered their trademark as a com domain rather than fighting a lengthy battle with domain grabbers as many have done later. Cisco and a few others on the list make sense, since they are pretty tightly coupled with the success of the internet, being more or less networking companies.

But, bluntly, why should any flower shop or manufacturer of beer bottles register "his" domain in the 80s? It was hardly their topic, and hardly any sensible way to sell their goods without an audience willing and able to buy via the net.

Re:This was the 80s

1985, first domain.

Which is kind of odd, since, by 1987 when I got to college, just about every technical company and University that I had regular dealings with had a domain name. It goes to show how fast it scaled.

Does it make sense to register a COM domain? As in Commercial?

Actually, in the beginning, ".com" was a dumping ground for those commercial organizations that were considered "just barely worthy." The perception was that the Internet was for the .mil and .edu crowd who were the founders of the Apranet. .com was created for those companies that wanted to be able to do business with the Internet-savvy types in the universities and military via email or offer ftp access to software updates and the like. There was no real sense that .com was for commercial exploitation of the Net.

But, bluntly, why should any flower shop or manufacturer of beer bottles register "his" domain in the 80s? It was hardly their topic, and hardly any sensible way to sell their goods without an audience willing and able to buy via the net.

And really, they should not have. They had no business (I mean that literally) using the Internet of that day. In the 90s, with the advent of the Web, everything changed. But remember that the Net predates the Web, and back in those days it wasn't really a place that flower shops could have gotten anything from.

Re:This was the 80s

"back in those days it wasn't really a place that flower shops could have gotten anything from."

That was until FTP was discovered.

The Flower Transfer Protocol changed the internet forever.

Re:This was the 80s

The reason for those .com registrations back then is not what you assume... the reason was the need for human readable e-mail addresses. Most corporations wanted quick and easy way to exchange mails with .edu and .mil.
You could either send snail-mail, call the university (or Pentagon) and hope somebody knew where the person you wanted to speak with were... or you could register on the net and send him an e-mail... and remember, this was the pre-cellular era.
DEC was btw. very much involved in the whole (d)arpanet project (many universities used DEC computers to power the net back then).
IBM was big iron for big business and tried btw. to build a global network based on SNA (read your SNA manual again, if you don't belive me).
...and yes you are right... the only reason for a pizzeria in Palo Alto to have a registered domain was for all those guys from HP, DEC and Cisco to order pizza by email... daily... tons of pizza every day... well, somebody just didn't see that option back then.

Siemens, a bit of history

> Some companies realized that this will be the future (and I'm honestly surprised to see Siemens on the list, they must've had better and more visionary people in their upper echelons back then), and they registered their trademark as a com domain rather than fighting a lengthy battle with domain grabbers as many have done later.

At the time we (I speak as a Siemens employee about the time) were developing a Unix based minicomputer systes based around National Semiconductor chips - the MX range of computers which were widely used by the German State (post, trains, work service etc). We then moved onto an i386 architecture, first with a port of SCO Unix then we did the actual Intel port of Unix 5.4 for AT&T. Our customers were pretty heavy users of TCP/IP - for network printing and file sharing.

I don't know who registered siemens.com, we also had siesoft.co.uk for the UK. However the Unix visionary was Hans Strack Zimmermann. I don't recall the research headquarters in Munich having great connectivity at the time. I seem to recall most traffic went via UUCP via Dusseldorf university and was charged by the kilobyte but we did have ftp access by about 1988. I ran up a 70,000 DM bill with a colleague downloading stuff like the King James Bible!!!

Siemens was a founder member of the OSF so has pretty good credentials.

What?

No ASCIIPORN.COM?

SCO before Microsoft

I wonder when Microsoft finally got on board? Damn, I shoulda squatted!!!

McDonalds

Wired Magazine famously squatted [wired.com] mcdonalds.com in 1994. Worth a read for those wondering what the pre-dot-com corporate mentality was like.

the meaning of TLDS

I'm sure when the net was young that .orgs had to be non profit, and .nets were ISPs, but all of that seems to have totally disappeared. I also think its a bit sad that we have .co.uk and so on, but nobody used any .us or .usa names. .com became the default URL that you had to have, with everything else being cheap and forgettable. People can tell my site is UK site and that I'm a UK company, but US companies are completely invisible, with the rush for everyone to be dotcom. I'm sure a lot of UK customers are automatically pleasantly disposed towards my company when they realise I'm a bit 'local' to them, but the same thing isn't an option in the US.
Given the ubiquity of bookmarks, hyperlinks and google, do we even need catchy domain names any more? I might have paid over the odds many years ago to get an easily remembered one, but now? who cares, people will find you with google anyway right?

.org was always a catch-all

I'm sure when the net was young that .orgs had to be non profit

.org was not created for non-profit organizations, it was originally created as a catch-all for organizations that didn't meet the requirements for the other gTLDs. PIR's History Page [pir.org], RFC 920 [ietf.org], RFC 1591 [ietf.org]

How much did it cost?

Just curious, anyone know how much it cost to register a domain back at the beginning?

Where's the last bunch?

This 'first 100 .com' stuff is all nice and dandy, but what I want to see is the LAST one hundred .com domains.

Checklist...

Excerpt from checklist for when I get my time machine working:

#10: Visit 1985 and buy up all 18,252 .COM domain names consisting of 2 and 3 letters.

Dan East

Ugh, my eyes.

I believe that website was made in 1985, and hasn't been updated since.

Fanboyism

Apple is there
Microsoft is not

wiki

here is a nice linked list of the *.com list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com [wikipedia.org]

And some sites still have 80's design

Like John Gilmore's [toad.com] site.

Simple and to the point.

BTW this is the guy who can't fly because he refuses to get a government issued ID. Interesting stuff.

More Interesting....

I think it would be more interesting to see the "First 100 dot com's that were sold for big money"

.com-to-.com email forbidden

Keep in mind that in those days the Internet was not supposed to be used for commercial purposes.

In those days, .com's were only supposed to be on the net as a convenience for fostering research collaboration between them and their .edu partners.

In theory, it was OK to send email from a .edu to a .edu, from a .edu to a .com it had a research relationship with, or from a .com to a .edu it had a research relationship, but .com's were not supposed to exchange email directly.

Coincidence ?

In March 1986, it's interesting to see that HP, Bell, IBM, SUN, Intel and TI registered their domain during the same month. IBM and SUN, but also Intel and TI got theirs on the exact same day.

Conspiracy

This confirms our theories:

STARGATE.COM August 5 1986

IDE.com registration and use of email

I was founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments, Inc. (ide.com), which was the 78th dotcom on the "first 100" list. IDE developed the Software through Pictures multi-user graphical modeling environment that ran on a heterogeneous network of Unix workstations. We released our product in late 1984, got VC funding in May, 1988, and lasted until November, 1996, when we were merged into Aonix, which still exists today.

Although we were 78th on that list, I believe that we were among the very first to place an ad that used an email address as a contact point. I was able to find an ad from the August, 1987, issue of Unix World, where we gave our email address as ucbvax!sun!ide!sales, using the UUCP format. Our customers were developers and early adopters, mostly on Sun workstations, so we actually got some email and some sales leads in this way. Of course, we switched to the "@ide.com" format as soon as we were able to do so. (Please post a reply if you are aware of an earlier use of an email address in a published ad.)

Fun times....

Re:IDE.com registration and use of email

I was wondering if anyone else was going to bring this up or if I'd have to. Since .com was the ugly stepsister, and most everyone had email and file transfer access through uucp, most people weren't in a hurry to change anything. For a small company without any research ties, it was (a) hard to get anything besides third or lower tier uucp, (b) a connection besides uucp to a university or a well-connected friend's company was horribly expensive, and (c) there wasn't much point- it bought you nothing.

In 1988 I worked at Sales Technologies, which went by ...emory.edu!stiatl . Even when we registered salestech.com, it took a while before we could really do much with it. 98% of the people we did anything with still had to reach us through UUCP, which meant !!!!!!stiatl.

It gave us huge geek foo, though.

Nasty site..

http://www.whoisd.com/oldestcom.php [whoisd.com] is the list I have had in my bookmark for a good few years..

1985 - that late ?

I thought that I was late when I registered my name in early 1988. NRS registration in the UK started in 1983.

We had names the other way round in those days, most significant bit first: uk.co.phcomp

3COM broke the rules for DNS names

You might have noticed 3COM.COM on that list, about half way down. Strictly speaking it was not allowed to use a number as the first letter in a DNS name. To quote from RFC 1035:

"The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less."

I remember wondering how 3COM got away with it.

Re:The First Post Registered

Spam boy: Do not try and post the first. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. Neo: What truth? Spam boy: There is no first. Neo: There is no first? Spam boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the first that is posted, it is only yourself, being a fucktard.