Interesting if you haven't seen it before, but that blog post is kind of terrible. (Calling them "WWW" domains? In 1985?)<p>Wikipedia has the list too, along with the corresponding domains in .org, .net, etc.:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...</a>
I worked at BBN (#2) for 2.5 Years right when I graduated from college. Genius level colleagues; The types of guys that would download computer viruses and decompile them "Just to look at the code."<p>A funny story is when they called me for an interview, my Mom said "It's BB&T on the line." and my response was "I bank with Bank Of America." Then she said "Just take the call!"
This list makes the rounds every year or so, but I always like seeing it; one of the domains is a special one to me, although I was not there at the time it was registered. UniPress Software (unipress.com, #80 on the list) was my first job while in college in the late 90s, and gave me the ~14 year experience of creating a product that went through all of the stages from "figuring out if people want a web-based application that does ___" to being a grown up, enterprise software that was acquired by a very large company. The two founders had real software-startup instinct before startup/entrepreneur was something written about, a love for what it is that we do, and are still close friends. It was a great place to be, a great time, and awesome people to be around. The two founders reached the age of retirement and sold the company years ago, but have been involved in two startups since, just because it's what they like. It makes sense that they would have bought a domain when it was a "pioneer" thing to do.<p>Most recently, seeing that Twitter was becoming very popular, Mark had been pumping out PHP code using CodeIgniter and made www.mediaroost.com in his spare time, a Twitter Management platform. It didn't take off, he retired it, but had a good time. Going way back, this is the same guy who wrote C compilers and sold Whitesmiths Ltd which released the first commercial C compiler.<p>(and going back before my time again, but interesting history - UniPress had also purchased Gosling Emacs which then became UniPress Emacs, controversially asking Richard Stallman to stop distributing GNU emacs source code.)
Sat with a fellow student at 3am in a UMIST lab in early 90s. Trying to resolve 'levi.com', 'cocacola.com' etc. on some early rev Mosaic ... rarely find a registered brand ... "someone needs to make page with a list of ones that work" ... go back to COBOL project.
There's gotta be a way to create a site where you can catch up on stuff that is often resubmitted to reddit and HN (and even digg!). I don't know how one can do that without human moderators or expensive and difficult AI.<p>People who have never seen this list before find it interesting. People who have been on reddit and HN see it every other month. Some way to please both groups so everyone is happy would be nice.
This is a TED talk by the creator of think.com: <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_crash_we_need_a_plan_b.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_cra...</a><p>He touches on his early realization that he could have taken a ton of domain names & made some money, but that would have gone against the spirit of the internet at that time (i.e. don't take more than you need.)
Sad to see that "think.com" is so underused. Oracle would do well by me to donate it to one of the many educational initiatives for use today (think.com resolves to this <a href="http://www.thinkquest.org/en/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thinkquest.org/en/</a>)<p>Recently I went looking at the registration for love.com, but that was a relative newbie, being registered in 1998. How did it take so long for someone to snatch that up? (sadly, that too is being wasted by a corporation: AOL)
This reminds me of a book published, back in the early 90's that contained a list of every public email address on the internet. It was smaller than the average phone book.<p>I imagine an updated edition would be a little larger. Or have really tiny type...
Interesting to compare this list to the current Fortune 500 list to get a list of companies that were first on the net and also managed to stay very profitable over the last couple of decades.<p>Just from a glance, looks like IBM and AT&T made both lists. I'm sure there are others.
Previous occurrences/discussion of same thing here:<p><a href="https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=oldest+domains&start=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=oldest+domains...</a>
Interesting that some companies really advertise on the oldest domain, <a href="http://symbolics.com" rel="nofollow">http://symbolics.com</a>. (Or it's fake so others want to advertise, too.)
As someone who was being born when those domains were being registered, can anyone shed some light onto what the internet was like back then? (my understanding is that there wasn't a www back then)
Has anyone gotten in early on namecoin domain names? There are still a lot available when I checked. Unfortunately the process seemed really complex so I kind of gave up for now. Any thoughts?