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

cambus.net

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

#91

Post by ci5er »

awb wrote: post #19

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.

I think you could do online+fax-followup from sometime around 93 or 94, but until then: mail. Even then online was dodgy (unreliable) at best. Easier to call ISI and see how they wanted it this year...

EDIT: I operated a regional thing off BBN, and I could do the nasty bits of hoisting myself to administrative acceptance. I can't imagine what it must have required for someone just trying to 'join' before 1990-or-so.

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

#93

Post by ghaff »

jwn wrote: post #90
monkeynotes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#94

Post by ci5er »

ant6n wrote: post #30
chrisacky wrote: post #27

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..

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.

Paul Allen sued me (us) to claw interval.net back in early 1995...

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

#97

Post by dddw »

nodja wrote: post #79
icedchai wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Whoever owns the trademark can file a trademark dispute and get the domain back for "cheap".

just like hydrox cookies

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

joeblau wrote: post #66

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 pe…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by acuozzo »

reaperducer wrote: post #22
rconti wrote: post #3

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."

> 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.

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