100 Oldest Domains
Category: Internet...
Posted Thursday, December 01, 2005 at 03:44 PM [GMT-6]

While browsing through this list of the first 100 .com domain names registered, the following Observations Occurred At Random™:

  • Apple is #64, having registered its domain name on February 19, 1987. That, according to the WHOIS lookup I just performed, is approximately four years ahead of Microsoft (May 2, 1991). I'd say that the four year gap in innovation has remained the one constant in the relationship between those two companies.

  • The oldest domain name, symbolics.com, is still active although it belongs to a different company...or a different permutation of the the original company. I'm sure many of companies associated with the domains listed are now defunct...tandy.com being a prime nostalgic example.

  • For the most part, these are really boring names, mostly company or organization names, to be exact. The concept of URLs as marketing tools apparently had not yet been fleshed out. However, #3 on the list, think.com is an exception, belonging to the Oracle Education Foundation. (I wonder if Oracle was the original registrant?) But conspicuous by their absences are those generic noun- and adjective-based domains that would later make some lucky and insightful folks wealthy and/or infamous. I mean, surely someone in the 80s was thinking "sex.com," or was that early period really that geeky?

  • The one guy who seemed to be ahead of the curve was John Gilmore, whose toad.com slipped in at #84 (August 18, 1987). Gilmore's site is, well, a bit spare, to be diplomatic, but the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation doesn't seem like the type to worry much about such things as design. It's interesting to contemplate what he might have accomplished if the web had been flourishing in the 60s.

  • It took about 2 1/2 years to register the first 100 domains. It's difficult to get a handle on current counts, but most agree that the total number of active domains is now in excess of 100 million. From tiny acorns...

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Comments

We fall in at 1996 with n-i.com... a domain that was not all that original but got the job done.

-Drew
ValueTech

Posted by: Drew Nichols at December 1, 2005 11:27 PM

Drew, I didn't even think to check on my earliest domain name registrations. The first one was for my church (fbc-midland.org): 9/96. I picked up another one for my nonprofit web design efforts (virtualservant.org) 9/97 and my current domain was registered January of 2000, so it's a relative newcomer.

I remember your n-i.com. ;-)

Posted by: Eric at December 2, 2005 07:04 AM

Seems like yesterday, doesn't it? :-)

Think of the domains we could have registered in late 1996. Anything blog related that you wanted. E.G. That Really Big Do No Eviler (reg. 1997)

Posted by: Drew Nichols at December 2, 2005 07:42 PM
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