31–40 of 141 posts
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..
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..
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..
I'm fairly sure if you extended the list to idk, 1000 or 10.000 you'd see all two/three letter domains being taken. Same with e.g. Twitter accounts. You might still have a chance with your local Slack team though.
Crazy to think the oldest domain is 12 days older than me (registered 1985-03-15)
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.
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."
The oldest domain is still going strong 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.…
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..
First you had to know what the internet was.
There was a massive wave of domain-squatting round about 2000 in the dotcom boom, and as a result "trademark reform" was enacted to allow brands to confiscate their named domains from domain squatters.
Also, quite a lot of domains had specific requirements. You either had to be in the country, or a specific kind of business, or know the sysadmin running the registry personally.
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 - Aliv…
Speaking of DEC.com, it was purchased for $57,500 few years ago by Paul Kocher. I'd say it was a bargain, considering the rich heritage of DEC and it's alexa ranking.