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100 oldest .com domains (iwhois.com)
50 points by joao on Dec 13, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments



8 of the 10 oldest domains can be tied to lisp... and to keven bacon...

1. symbolics.com: made Lisp machines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics

2. bbn.com: BBN made BBN Lisp for the PDP-1: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/index.html...

3. think.com: homepage of Thinking Machines Incorporated, the company that made lisp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Lisp

4. ...

5. dec.com: Digital Equipment Corporation (which got bought by compaq, which was bought by HP) made PDP microcomputers. The first interactive lisp was implemented on the PDP-1 in 1963 by Peter Deutsch http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/node5.html

6. northrop.com: northrop is still using lisp http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2005/speakers.h...

7. xerox.com: xerox made the Xerox Lisp Machines http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/lisp/

8. sri.com: SRI is still using lisp http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/it_management/sri...

9. hp.com: HP can be tied to lisp... but more strongly to keven bacon... http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/90/HPL-90-213.html

10. ...


My coworker has a symbolics.com email address. He has a (sometimes) working Lisp machine in his living room.


"... bbn.com: BBN made BBN Lisp for the PDP-1 ..."

bbn have been making a lot of things first ~ http://www.bbn.com/about/timeline/


Interesting bit of trivia: nobody can ever have example.com, example.net, or example.org because it's a reserved domain for the RFC. Check it out at www.example.com.


http://symbolics.com/ doesn't look like it's been updated too much since then either.

Here it is from 98, no divs, no doc-type: http://web.archive.org/web/19981207002851/stony-brook.scrc.s...


Notice that Apple.com is on here, but no Microsoft.com.


I'm not surprised. Microsoft (Bill Gates) didn't see the point of the Internet for a long time.


Sometimes it's hard to believe that the oldest domain is still less than 25 years old.


"Some companies," I told Jane Hulbert, "are even registering the names of their competitors."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds.html


"No burger_king.com either."

I find it sort of amusing people thought we would be using underscores in place of spaces in domain names.

Also amusing:

"The guy in registration? One person is responsible for assigning domain names on the Internet?

Actually, "We have 2.5 people doing it," Williamson said, meaning that the half person is really a full person doing it part-time."


To place this in context...I was six, and my family couldn't afford a computer. It would be another 2 years before we had a Dell in the house.

I've kinda been addicted to it since.


http://whois.domaintools.com/nordu.net


Were there any restrictions on what you could register? (i.e. only domains related to your company)

I'd have thought people would have registered generic words first...


Yeah, people used to care back in the day, like whether you were commercial or nonprofit, etc. .net was reserved for infrastructure providers, organizations who actually owned and operated the physical bits of the network. Nowadays it's a free for all, tho' I think .edu still maintains criteria for registration.

There was a long-running saga of people trying to register fuck.com and being told "no" too.


anybody knows what was the price to buy 1 back then?


It was free, you just had to have a reason for it.


Are they still free? Or are they now paying renewal fees like the rest of us?


No they pay now. At the time the fees were billed as a way of expiring unused domains, if you didn't pay, after a while they'd delete the domain.

It didn't work out that way exactly once the company realized how much money they could make.

I'm still kicking myself for not registering some names. But at the time it was all ethical and you were not supposed to register something unless you actually needed it.


"But at the time it was all ethical"

Similar to that is the impression between people who know each other that is not ethical to do a similar software business. I assume this is more valid between programmers than in any other industry because people involved are more often more nice. But I suppose someone will live to understand that this is wrong to assume.


Hah:

86= 03-Sep-1987 SCO.COM

for how much longer, I wonder?


Holy crap, the top 6 are older than me.


All that work for a yourmom.com joke.




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