an interesting little factoid: domains were free to register until 1995

...approximately October 5th 1995. spy.net was requested before it was announced that they were charging, but they grandfathered us in anyway. :)

Of course, like an old fogey, I'll state that it was all downhill from there. The ``one organization, one domain'' rules, etc... all died when people realized they could make more money by making it chaos.

Some good probably came out of that, though I'd say domain squatters did enough harm to make that severely unbalanced.

My first domain was guetech.org, running over a UUCP link to eskimo.com, I remember having to fill out and email a text template to request it. I think this was sometime around 1995. I still have the domain :)

I think the absence of microsoft.com is telling. They really didn't see where the internet was heading.

the time span is interesting. a full ~2.5yrs for 100 domains to be registered.

That's 100 .com domains. During that time, .edu, .org, .mil, and other non-commercial addresses were probably more popular.

I'm assuming that these weren't the first 100 but the oldest 100 domains that have been registered even until now.

"mcc.com" has been snapped up by a domains squatter, so I assume that the list is of the first 100 registered.

No 'microsoft.com', but Apple registered their domain 'apple.com' in 1987.

I'm now intensely curious about what the oldest "popular" hostnames were before there was the DNS.

Also, what were FMC, Alcoa, and DuPoint doing with domain names?

I'm assuming their researchers wanted email, to chat with their university buddies.

My oldest is 1999. I read somewhere that google also uses that in there complex page rank and results page.