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Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

cambus.net

81–90 of 141 posts

Re: Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

#81
post #18
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... 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.

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

Re: Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

#83
post #51

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.

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.

Re: Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

#84

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.

Why would it have a high Alexa rating. Seems suspicious.

Re: Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

#86
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you're right - from Wikipedia: Two-letter .com domain names were never reserved. It was possible for anyone to register them in the very early years of the Internet (from 1985 to 1998). The first company to own an active Two Letter Domain is Hewlett-Packard. Since 1998 all permutations of the 26 × 26 = 676 .com domains have been registered and (barring the very unlikely event of a lapse in registration) th…

Since you can also use numbers, shouldn't that read "all permutations (...) 36x36 = 1296 .com domains" ?

> Two-letter

Numbers are not letters, but you're right, that's the correct number of possible two-character .com domains.

Re: Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

Re: Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes me wonder why would Compaq / HP, or whoever was owner of DEC at the time, have let this valuable asset go for so little...

Yahoo began liquidating a bunch of old domains back in ~2013 (eg AV.com, formerly owned by AltaVista; Sled.com; and Sandwich.com for $137k, formerly owned by Broadcast.com, among hundreds of others), HP might have been doing something similar. Sweeping out the closet. $57k for a solid three letter domain with history certainly does seem cheap. I wonder what Musk paid for X.com, to get it from PayPal (surely seven figures).

Re: Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

#89

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.…

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

Hmm is that really true? According to this list the 100th .com domain was registered in November 1987, while it took .org and .net until May 1991 and April 1993, respectively, to reach their 100th registrations. It seems there was much more demand for .com right off the bat.

EDIT: I assumed these were all open to anyone as they are today, thereby the number of .coms indicated higher demand/desirability. Seems that .net (and maybe .org as well) used to be restricted, which is what led to their slower pace of registrations. Makes more sense in that context.

Re: Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

#90
post #71

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.

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

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?

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