Interesting Net Facts

Maintaining an online presence can be hard work at the best of times but more often than not it is quite rewarding. I’ve made many friends during my travels through cyberspace and came across some very interesting sites. All of this made me think about the internet in general and how much it has changed over the years. Remember those silly table-based HTML pages that were so popular when the web was young? Have you ever wondered what was the very first DOT COM? Yes, I do in fact have that answer.

The Domain Name system (DNS) which translates computer host names into IP addresses was created in 1984. The year 1985 saw the birth of top level domains which included COM, ORG, EDU, GOV, MIL and ccTLD. The first half of ’85 was busy indeed as cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu and ucla.edu were the first registered domain names. June was witness to the birth of css.gov, the very first .gov while the first .org was mitre.org registered in July. And what was the first DOT COM? It was symbolics.com registered 15 March 1985. What follows are a few of the first 100 registered domains:

• SYMBOLICS.COM – March 15 1985
• BBN.COM – April 24 1985
• THINK.COM – May 24 1985
• MCC.COM – July 11 1985
• DEC.COM – September 30 1985
• NORTHROP.COM – November 7 1985
• XEROX.COM – January 9 1986
• SRI.COM – January 17 1986
• HP.COM – March 3 1986
• BELLCORE.COM – March 5 1986

You can read the remainder of the list here.

originally published 30 Dec 2007