Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs

I worked for bbn.com back in the mid 2000&#x27;s before they went out of business. BBN employed some of the smartest people I&#x27;ve ever worked with, but the company couldn&#x27;t figure out how to keep the business relationships going. I remember having a conversation with my colleague saying &quot;How does a company that invents the internet go out of business?&quot;<p>I was eventually laid off along with about 30% of the company. I saw people who worked there for 18 years brought to tears because BBN was all they knew. My key take away was that experience was that no matter how impactful your tech company is on society, leadership&#x27;s vision really determines the trajectory.

Top 20:<p>symbolics.com - Still exists<p>bbn.com - Redirects to raytheon.com<p>think.com - Dead<p>mcc.com - Redirects to thecryptogenius.com (sometimes, not sure what&#x27;s going on with it)<p>dec.com - Redirects to paulkocher.com<p>northrop.com - Dead<p>xerox.com - Alive, Xerox website<p>sri.com - Alive<p>hp.com - Alive, HP website<p>bellcore.com - Dead<p>ibm.com - Alive, IBM website<p>sun.com - Alive, sun website (oracle.com)<p>intel.com - Alive, intel website<p>ti.com - Alive, Texas Instruments<p>att.com - Alive, ATT<p>gmr.com - Dead<p>tek.com - Alive, Tektronix website<p>fmc.com - Alive, FMC website<p>ub.com - Alive, United Bitcoin website<p>bell-atl.com - Dead

For the record: the first .com companies were mostly heavy AI&#x2F;Lisp users:<p>Symbolics -&gt; Lisp Machines, Lisp software<p>BBN -&gt; Jericho Lisp Machine, BBN Lisp, various Lisp applications<p>Thinking Machines -&gt; Connection Machine CM1, a massive parallel accelerator for Symbolics Lisp Machine, *Lisp<p>MCC -&gt; had a network of 100+ Lisp Machines, developed Cyc, Orion (a Lisp OODB) and a Lisp-based CAD system - amongst others<p>Xerox -&gt; Interlisp, Interlisp-D Lisp Machine<p>SRI -&gt; AI research with lots Lisp applications

Were original registrations done by mail?<p>I see 5 domains registered on Aug. 5th, 1986, then no more domains for another month. And 12 on Dec. 11 1986, then again another month with no registrations.

In the sea of dead links, early tech companies, think tanks, and so on, I was happy to see my local (Boston) PBS and NPR affiliate, WGBH. I don&#x27;t usually think of public broadcasting as an early tech adopter, so even in Boston it was a pleasant surprise to see they registered one of the first 100 .org domains.

We have <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;octopus.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;octopus.com</a>, which is on the list. And first registered the year I was born. Has an interesting history: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wipo.int&#x2F;amc&#x2F;en&#x2F;domains&#x2F;decisions&#x2F;text&#x2F;2011&#x2F;d2011-0417.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wipo.int&#x2F;amc&#x2F;en&#x2F;domains&#x2F;decisions&#x2F;text&#x2F;2011&#x2F;d2011...</a><p>&gt; Respondent Yana Beklova, who at one stage worked for the Complainant, requested an amount between USD 500,000 and USD 1,000,000 for the transfer of the disputed domain name, that the registrant of the disputed domain name sought to hide its identity through a WhoIs privacy protection service, that the Respondents tried to transfer the disputed domain name out of the reach of the Australian courts to avoid legal proceedings after having received the cease and desist letter, that some of the Respondents named by the Complainant have been involved in previous UDRP proceedings, which suggests a pattern of conduct, and that the disputed domain name was registered to intentionally attract customers looking for the Complainant’s website for commercial gain by creating a likelihood of confusion.

Should also include an .edu list.<p>IIRC, rice.edu was the 8th domain registered on the entire internet.

I wonder what the story is behind nordu.net being the first registered domain name (I&#x27;m assuming it&#x27;s the same nordu.net that exists today; I don&#x27;t actually know although the dates seem to match up.) It is associated with research networks but it still seems a bit odd that they registered before BBN, Berkeley, and organizations like those.

My employer, MITRE, is known for being the first to register a .org TLD. It&#x27;s a pretty neat bit of computing history.

Just a side question... how could I have registered a domain name back in the 80&#x27;s? What was the process back in those days ?

Back when .net domains were actually networks.<p>And seeing fidonet.org brought back a wave of nostalgia.

What was registration fees back then? Why wouldn&#x27;t people just squat on a bunch of two&#x2F;three letter domains? Was it prohibitively difficult to register..

This must be missing entries. For example, look up ca.com:<p>created: 1985-01-01<p>Making it 2 months older than the earliest dot com on the list.

Checks one from the 90&#x27;s:<p>&gt; <i>This Site Is Under Construction and Coming Soon.</i><p>I won&#x27;t hold my breath!

I&#x27;m surprised no-one has pointed out that many UK academic addresses effectively remain from the days of SRCNET&#x2F;SERCNET -- I forget when it changed -- in the early &#x27;80s, and possibly late &#x27;70s. It&#x27;s just that they&#x27;ve changed from the NRS big-endian scheme (as IP addresses) to DNS little-endian, i.e. liv.ac.uk now, instead of uk.ac.liv where I started. (There was a long and short form of most names, so uk.ac.liv and uk.ac.liverpool were equivalent.) Much confusion between, e.g., cs as computer science and Czechoslovakia in the period when both endians were allowed...

I had ign.org registered in the 1994 timeframe. Don&#x27;t know why I let it lapse!

Lots of business and org names are acronyms, but it really stands out to me how most of the early ones are short. I guess in the age of excessively-long UUCP addresses, it was immediately obvious that short domain names would be preferable to longer ones.

Given how many people &#x2F; media say we are entering an App world, are domain name still worth a lot of money?<p>I waited for .Web I think for now close or over a decade? And it doesn&#x27;t seems to be coming despite all the silly Tld we have now.

It&#x27;s funny that several of the top ones on the lists use light blue colours prominently. For a moment, I wondered if some of them had been collected and were run by a single organisation.

I had thought two letter TLDs weren’t allowed till the mid 90s... but this shows they were allowed from the beginning. Maybe I’m thinking single alphanumeric domains.

I am surprised by the number of funny&#x2F;visionary domains. Broken.net, super.org or portal.com as part of these lists is funny.

trivial thing I noticed: eff.org predates fsf.org by ~3 months. must have been a fun time to be at the genesis of so much.

On this note: in 1986 the .nl became official being the first country domain outside of the US with: www.cwi.nl

Is there a way to check the date a specific domain was registered?

Is there a free and unlimited Whois query ?

intel.com is there... microsoft.com isn&#x27;t.

The oldest domain is still going strong <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nordu.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nordu.net</a><p><i>NORDUnet is a collaboration between the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) of the five Nordic countries; Denmark (DeIC), Iceland (RHnet), Norway (UNINETT), Sweden (SUNET), and Finland (Funet). The Nordic region (five countries and three autonomous areas) has a population of 25 million, 9 official languages, and a strong tradition of collaboration. Together, the countries form the world’s 11th largest economy.<p>NORDUnet was founded in 1985 as a result of the NORDUNET programme and is jointly owned by the five Nordic countries. Each of the Nordic NRENs has a seat on the board and share the base costs according to the country GDP.<p>NORDUnet operates a world-class network and e-infrastructure service for the Nordic R&amp;E community. The five NRENs develop and operate the national research network infrastructures, connecting more than 400 research &amp; education institutions with more than 1.2 million users.</i>

Anyone remember AOL Keywords?

Crazy to think the oldest domain is 12 days older than me (registered 1985-03-15)

That&#x27;s really interesting data! I threw up a quick viz of the data: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;public.tableau.com&#x2F;profile&#x2F;braxtone7168#!&#x2F;vizhome&#x2F;Earliest100Domains&#x2F;Earliest100RegisteredDomainsbyTLD" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;public.tableau.com&#x2F;profile&#x2F;braxtone7168#!&#x2F;vizhome&#x2F;Ea...</a>