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.

Symbolics ...

[foobsr]

... 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:Internet connections

[jcorno]

That wasn't entirely true. It was IBM-Sun, then Intel-TI. That actually still makes sense. AMD was on a different day from the other three, though. That's what I get for not double-checking before posting.

Re:This was the 80s

[tverbeek]

Back in those days there was a widespread belief (correct or not) that the internet could not be use for commercial purposes (the main argument being the US government's funding of the backbone). Sure, there was a "COM" TLD, but that was really just a basket for outfits that didn't fall into one of the main TLDs: GOV (government agencies), NET (infrastructure providers), EDU (colleges), ORG (non-profits), and MIL (military). If a commercial entity wanted on the net, they were welcome, but the assumption among most netizens at the time was that they were doing it to participate in the net's non-commercial activities.

wiki

[tofupup]

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

Re:How much did it cost?

[Salamander]

Read it again; that was 1995, not 1985. Domains were free for a long time.

In 1995 the NSF authorized NSI to begin charging registrants (of .org and .net as well as .com) an annual fee, for the first-time since its inception.

(The grammar error is the responsibility of the wikidork who made the entry.) I wasn't in early enough to get a domain for free, but I do have one for which I paid a one-time fee.

Re:Symbolics ...

[rs79]

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:How much did it cost?

[ThreeGigs]

It was free at the very beginning. Mostly because it was all handwritten on paper then typed into a text file. Registering went something like "Hey Jack, can ya write me into the hosts file?"

And some sites still have 80's design

[NotQuiteReal]

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.

.org was always a catch-all

[Cadre]

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]

Re:How much did it cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was an electronic form, a text file you'd download from sri-nic.arpa (later nic.ddn.mil), fill in the blanks and email back to sri-nic.

For all that, it wasn't all that far removed from "Hey Jack".

Re:Rough X-mas Shopping

[poormanjoe]

From the wiki:
An estimated US$23 billion were secretly spent for research and development on the B-2 in the 1980s. An additional expense was caused by changing its role in 1985 from a high-altitude bomber to a low-altitude bomber, which required a major redesign. B-2 in flight over the Mississippi River (St. Louis, Missouri) with the Gateway Arch and Busch Stadium in the background.The first B-2 was publicly displayed on 22 November 1988, when it was rolled out of its hangar at Air Force Plant 42, Palmdale, California, where it was built. Its first public flight was on 17 July 1989.

So after 23 billion secretly spent dollers you think the American public was the first to see what had been built the day before? Unless you worked on the project, you cannot say when it was "ready" It's probly wasnt ready until the communists figured out what we had built, and it was then obsolete.

Re:Stargate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the movie. Stargate was a project that transmitted a USENET feed via satellite (in the vertical blanking interval on WTBS, actually - ah, Night Tracks, we hardly knew ye).

Pyramid was a hardware manufacturer, Vortex was (is) Lauren Weinstein's consulting company (I believe), Portal was an early (arguably the first) commercial USENET provider, and Rosetta was (is) Scott Warren's consulting company.

Re:How much did it cost?

[RevWaldo]

Not so much a cost issue but up until the mid-90's the PITA factor was a major hit in setting up a domain. No hosting services, so you'd need your own server. Private lines were way expensive and difficult to get set up with the phone company. No DSL so you'd need ISDN (56k! Wicked fast!) or bone up for a T1 or partial T1 which could run you $1000/month easy. Not to mention all the paperwork you'd have to submit to interNIC, etc. The best revenge on all the domain squatting is that all the "now a household word" domains use words no one would think were valuable - yahoo, google, etc ad infinitum. Have you had a need to visit computer.com? telephone.com? television.com?

Let's keep things in context

[north.coaster]

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:Internet connections

[raju1kabir]

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.

Re:What about .ARPA

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the domain name system was invented, there were just hostnames. ARPANET hosts had single, flat hostnames like SRI-NIC or UCBVAX (at Berkeley) or SU-TAC (Stanford) or MIT-EDDIE (which had a sibling, MIT-DEEP-THOUGHT). These were all kept in a single flat text file, maintained centrally by SRI-NIC (the Network Information Center at Stanford Research International).

When the ARPANET started implementing the DNS, .ARPA was invented as a temporary transitional measure. All those existing flat hostnames gained a .ARPA suffix, so they could be made to fit into the DNS while each institution managed a transition to "real" domains.

Today, as already mentioned, .arpa contains only certain low-level infrastructure like in-addr.arpa.

Re:This was the 80s

[Curunir_wolf]

Back in those days there was a widespread belief (correct or not) that the internet could not be use for commercial purposes (the main argument being the US government's funding of the backbone). Sure, there was a "COM" TLD, but that was really just a basket for outfits that didn't fall into one of the main TLDs: GOV (government agencies), NET (infrastructure providers), EDU (colleges), ORG (non-profits), and MIL (military). If a commercial entity wanted on the net, they were welcome, but the assumption among most netizens at the time was that they were doing it to participate in the net's non-commercial activities.

Yep. The first time I connected to the Internet (through Delphi - anybody else old enough to remember that one?) I had to sign a usage agreement. It basically stated that commercial activity was strictly prohibited. The only allowed activity was education, research, government, and "incidental personal use".

At the time, the entire thing was government funded.

This was way before HTML and NCSA Mosaic. The "cool" browsing application was gopher. Direct connections! Links from one site to another! Wow!

Re:Symbolics ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually used Symbolics machines at Cycorp. It was 1996-1999, the Symbolics company was already dead, and the machines were falling apart, but we had dozens of them and were cannibalizing them for parts. I think they were about 10 years old. They were extreme high-end machines when they were built, and they were on par with desktop PCs in 1996, but specialized enough to make it worthwhile to use (and the older programmers didn't want to give them up). Native LISP processing, no protected memory (multi-threaded but all threads could access the same memory like a single process). They were the size of end tables and put out enormous amounts of heat. Also we only had 2 working monitors, and couldn't buy more - but they could be used via a remote X-windows connection.

Re:Symbolics ...

[5pp000]

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.)

Re:.org was always a catch-all

[frank_adrian314159]

Now, what kind of of organization isn't governmental, educational, commercial, or military? A non-profit.

It all depends on what you mean by "non-profit". How about just a simple personal domain? Although most of these are de facto non-profits, common usage reserves the term non-profit for organizations that explicitly fall under IRS code section 503. So there are potential entities that fall under .org that do not fall under the rubric of "non-profit" organizations.

1985 - that late ?

[Alain Williams]

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

Re:.com-to-.com email forbidden

[afidel]

Sort of, the AUP for NSFNet did not allow for commercial use of the network, there could be communications between .com's but not for commercial purposes, ie if two defense contractors needed to work on a joint project that would be ok but not for one contractor to solicit business from another. That changed in 1988 which MCI Mail was experimentally hooked to the network, so not too long after the .com TLD.

3COM broke the rules for DNS names

[nuckfuts]

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.