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 people who worked there for 18 years brought to tears because BBN was all they knew. My key take away was that experience was that no matter how impactful your tech company is on society, leadership's vision really determines the trajectory.
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.
Sad to see the current state of http://symbolics.com/ with a big "as seen on" section and all those social sharing buttons. It's like updating a historical center with shag carpeting and lava lamps.
The fourth IETF proceedings (back when the Internet Engineering Task Force was an internet engineering task force) contains a list of the 143 second-level domains registered as of July 10, 1986.
Of the 40 listed .com domains, the following are not in the list in the OP article:
adelie.com
buck.com
cca.com
mecc.com
nbi.com
next.com
olivetti.com
proteon.com
pyr.com
rca.com
tmc.com
vse.com
One of the five listed .org domains is not in the article: csc.org
The one listed .net domain is cs.net, also not in the article.
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.
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).
How valuable was it really to HP/HPE? It's a domain name for a long-gone computer company. It's not like HPE has a big business in legacy DEC gear.
Even if someone else can wring some money out of it with ads or whatever, HPE isn't in that kind of business. Even for a big company, $60K is still $60K if you can get it for something that ha no value to you.
Funny that the 20th domain ever registered had a hyphen in it (bell-atl.com). They probably thought it would be easier to read than bellatl.com or bellatlantic.com
It doesn't surprise me that Northrop were early into domain registration, they always were an unconventional-thinking company.
Nor does it surprise me that the post-merger leadership abandoned the domain name. I think that says a lot about their attitude ( acquire, grow, acquire )
gmr.com whois - General Motors Research & Development Center of General Motors Research & Development Center since 2017. Gmr was registered with Network Solutions LLC. on May 08, 1986. General Motors Research & Development Center resides in WARREN, USA and their email is rpresby@mail.com.
"Think" was an actual IBM slogan well before ThinkPads. [0] (Which is also the reason behind Apple's "Think Different"). I guess the idea of using slogans as effective domain names wasn't as popular as today.
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.
Yes, they were done by email and were a massive pain in the ass. There was a text file template you'd fill out and email it to ISI. The domains were free but you had to have working nameservers for them and that was the tough part. As a young undergrad in 1993, I wanted to register a few but couldn't find anyone to serve DNS for me. The Vanderbilt IT staff was unwilling to help and I didn't know anybody else until I met my buddy Bob Collie (who owns bob.net). I ended up registering cjs.com, grateful.com, eleet.com and some others but let most of them expire when I couldn't afford the annual $70 per-domain fee that Network Solutions started charging after they took over from ISI. The only one I kept was bikeworld.com, which I had registered for my dad's bike shop. He still uses it today.
I believe they were done by email or online form (edited to be more accurate), but were all verified by a human and entered into the database manually. So you had to wait for the processing run to get your domain in, which was at the whims of the person who had to process them.
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.
In the sea of dead links, early tech companies, think tanks, and so on, I was happy to see my local (Boston) PBS and NPR affiliate, WGBH. I don't usually think of public broadcasting as an early tech adopter, so even in Boston it was a pleasant surprise to see they registered one of the first 100 .org domains.
> Respondent Yana Beklova, who at one stage worked for the Complainant, requested an amount between USD 500,000 and USD 1,000,000 for the transfer of the disputed domain name, that the registrant of the disputed domain name sought to hide its identity through a WhoIs privacy protection service, that the Respondents tried to transfer the disputed domain name out of the reach of the Australian courts to avoid legal proceedings after having received the cease and desist letter, that some of the Respondents named by the Complainant have been involved in previous UDRP proceedings, which suggests a pattern of conduct, and that the disputed domain name was registered to intentionally attract customers looking for the Complainant’s website for commercial gain by creating a likelihood of confusion.
I don't believe Wikipedia. The fourth IETF proceedings lists 90 .edu domains registered as of July 10, 1986.
Of those, 18 are still currently registered but are not in Wikipedia's list: buffalo.edu
colgate.edu
du.edu
houston.edu
lehigh.edu
merit.edu
mosis.edu
riacs.edu
sdsu.edu
sunysb.edu
tmc.edu
ucar.edu
uchicago.edu
uiowa.edu
umb.edu
uoregon.edu
villanova.edu
vt.edu
A further 7 are no longer registered:
mich-state.edu
ntsu.edu
ogc.edu
pittsburgh.edu
ukans.edu
wanginst.edu
waterloo.edu
Yeah, it must be based on querying whois, but for example, whois shows that uchicago.edu was registered in 1991 and northwestern.edu was registered in 1999 (!!). I suppose there may have been some lapse in the registration or something...
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.
You learn something new every day. I actually had to look them up. It appears that they're unique in having registered a domain name on the same day that DARPA registered the TLDs.
ADDED: I do wonder if the date is fudged a bit. I suppose it's possible that both DARPA and Nordic network people were hard at work registering things on New Year's Day but I have my doubts :-)
Anecdotally they also chased after a consultancy using mitre.com and forced them to give up their domain. The founders had gone to MIT and Rice University and were in a completely different sector but MITRE didn't care.
MITRE's not really a consultancy, but I wouldn't call them a completely unrelated field. Mitre.com now belongs to the soccer ball company so they couldn't have been too tight-fisted with it.
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..
You're looking at it with hindsight; at the time very few people had even heard of domain names, let alone why they should register a domain name, or that they would - eventually - be worth some money.
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.
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.
Piling on what others have said, the Web wasn't even a thing until the early 90's. There was minimal commercial value in a domain name at that point, so no incentive to squat on it and try to extort money. What did your average business or person care about a domain name in 1987? It wasn't one of the most critical pieces of your brand, as it is now.
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.
For that matter, /8 blocks were given out, if not quite like candy, certainly with considerable abandon. A fair number of the early universities and companies who registered ended up with complete /8 blocks all to themselves.
[EDIT: Duh. Of course, it was actually Class A blocks at the time.]
Just to nitpick, this was before CIDR, so you're probably referring to Class A blocks, of which there were only 125 (the first octet being 1-9,11-126).
Totally. ;) In all seriousness, I had friends who emailed Internic with fake company names and their home address. They received a Class C allocation in about a month.
Halliburton had 34.* and 134.132.* as of 2015 when I last worked there, but I looked a few months ago and they've sold off some of that /8 to Amazon and others.... A lot of places with /8s are fixing their wasteful allocations and making good money off of it.
There was actually no registration fee at all until 1997. I registered several domains that were "free" and remember having to pay $99/year for them at one point...
Yeah, after I posted that I realized that what I was remembering was a lot of fuss that they were going to charge, although I could have sworn that was more like 94-95ish. I do remember thinking that the amount was such that it'd not impact large companies but an individual, such as poor college students like myself at the time, might find it onerous.
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'm surprised no-one has pointed out that many UK academic addresses effectively remain from the days of SRCNET/SERCNET -- I forget when it changed -- in the early '80s, and possibly late '70s. It's just that they've changed from the NRS big-endian scheme (as IP addresses) to DNS little-endian, i.e. liv.ac.uk now, instead of uk.ac.liv where I started. (There was a long and short form of most names, so uk.ac.liv and uk.ac.liverpool were equivalent.) Much confusion between, e.g., cs as computer science and Czechoslovakia in the period when both endians were allowed...
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 a deeper reason than that. Humans are hardwired to start with short symbols.
Picture a group of humans who evolve a new language. That language will likely start with short sounds, and then progressively build up to longer sounds.
The two letter domain names really stuck out to me. I had a boss ask me back in the early 2000's to register a two letter domain and I was surprised to find that Network Solutions would no longer do that. I didn't spend much time on it so maybe another registrar would but as far as I can remember two letter domains just weren't an option at the point.
I guess TI, GE and HP were smart to grab them when they could!
I’m pretty sure every possible two letter combination was taken before that policy came out.
There used to be an old site that visualized the two- and three-letter domain name space as two- and three-dimensional grids. It was neat seeing the pixels fill in over time.
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) they can only be obtained by buying them from the previous owner.
Yeah, your "early 2000s comment" really stuck out to me. I'm surprised they lasted through 98.
I remember thinking domain names were for people who "really knew what they were doing" and then was pissed I didn't register one before NetSol started charging (IIRC there was a big outcry because Kraft foods registered like 137 domains right before they started charging).
Ironically, from what I've come to expect comparing popular websites to phishing websites, I have a knee-jerk worried reaction when I see a URL that isn't 'centre-heavy'.
It's funny that several of the top ones on the lists use light blue colours prominently. For a moment, I wondered if some of them had been collected and were run by a single organisation.
I had thought two letter TLDs weren’t allowed till the mid 90s... but this shows they were allowed from the beginning. Maybe I’m thinking single alphanumeric domains.
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. Together, the countries form the world’s 11th largest economy.
NORDUnet was founded in 1985 as a result of the NORDUNET programme and is jointly owned by the five Nordic countries. Each of the Nordic NRENs has a seat on the board and share the base costs according to the country GDP.
NORDUnet operates a world-class network and e-infrastructure service for the Nordic R&E community. The five NRENs develop and operate the national research network infrastructures, connecting more than 400 research & education institutions with more than 1.2 million users.
As a Nordic person whose ISP for several years was NORDUnet (via the university I studied at) I had no idea that they have the oldest .net domain in existence. Pretty cool.
.edu also. I remember when having .com in your email was looked down on. Back when getting email (via UUCP) was more exciting than getting a letter in the mail.
My first domain registered was "Creation Date: 1994-06-01T04:00:00Z", and it was a total pain in the ass, involving certified letters and other nonsense.
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.
I was eventually laid off along with about 30% of the company. I saw people who worked there for 18 years brought to tears because BBN was all they knew. My key take away was that experience was that no matter how impactful your tech company is on society, leadership's vision really determines the trajectory.