Oldest Domain Names

<a href="http://symbolics.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;symbolics.com&#x2F;</a> is just absolutely absurd now. Audi and Atari advertising next to a work from home scam, a domain name lawyer, a religious university, and a smattering of other random entities.<p>Somewhat ironically the first domain now just reflects the absolute nature of of the web itself.

&quot;Domain names have been actually been available for 28 years – yes, before you even knew what a computer looked like.&quot;<p>Guess I&#x27;m not part of domainholdings&#x27;s target audience. I&#x27;ve been programming computers for 33 years. So no, not before I even knew what a computer looked like.<p>But man, how much money would I have, had I snapped up as many www.&lt;fortune500companyname&gt;.com domains as I could, and sold them to the companies as they became internet-aware!

Wait, every single name here is a .com. I thought the Internet was non-commercial at first -- where are the .edu, .org, etc.? Did those not come until later, or is this list restricted?

I had no clue domains were available before I was born... that&#x27;s quite a strange thought. For some reason, I was thinking they wouldn&#x27;t have been around before the web.<p>A dumb question, but what exactly would you do with a domain name before 1990? Email is all I can think of.

Seeing Adobe as one of the oldest domain names is disappointing. They were perfectly positioned to take advantage of the growth of they internet, but were never able to capitalize. The company has really stagnated in the past 15 years.

What was registering a domain name like in 1986-87?

How many of these have been in continuous ownership since first being registered? I&#x27;m sure quite a few of them have, but I&#x27;d be curious. (For example, I&#x27;d have a hard time believing that &quot;Marble.com&quot; is the same entity today that it was 30 years ago, and WhoIs info goes back only so far).

Wow. Just at a glance, three minicomputer companies that have since vanished: DEC, DG, Prime. On the UNIX side, Sun and SCO, for mainframes Amdahl.<p>But I remember well downloading stuff from gatekeeper.dec.com.

It&#x27;s curious to note that the very first domain registration on any gTLD came from NORDUnet [1], precisely at the first day after the public launching of the <i>Domain Name System</i>, back in Jan 1, 1985. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORDUnet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;NORDUnet</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names#.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...</a>

Why are there so many of them that share dates of registration?

Why was stargate.com registered in August 5, 1986, and what was that for? The movie and show didn&#x27;t come out for another 9-10 years.

This is actually correct only for .com. There are other extensions with old &quot;domain names&quot; (Like .edu .org .mil etc.)<p>For example berkeley.edu dates to 1985 as does harvard.edu, mit.edu etc.<p>Domain Name: BERKELEY.EDU<p><pre><code> Registrar: EDUCAUSE Whois Server: whois.educause.net Referral URL: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.educause.edu&#x2F;edudomain Name Server: ADNS1.BERKELEY.EDU Name Server: ADNS2.BERKELEY.EDU Name Server: AODNS1.BERKELEY.EDU Name Server: AODNS2.BERKELEY.EDU Name Server: NS.V6.BERKELEY.EDU Name Server: PHLOEM.UOREGON.EDU Name Server: SNS-PB.ISC.ORG Status: ok Updated Date: 28-may-2013 Creation Date: 24-apr-1985 Expiration Date: 24-apr-2014 </code></pre> Additionally, the list doesn&#x27;t take into account that if a domain is deleted and re-registered the creation date reflects the re-registration date.<p>So a domain registered at the start (say <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;rfc1591.txt</a> by Jon Postel) that was dropped and re-registered would reflect the newer date.<p>So this is more accurately &quot;100 Oldest continuously registered .com domain names&quot;. (Note it also doesn&#x27;t take into account ownership changes)

&gt; Domain names were free until 1995.<p>Is this really true? My memory says differently, as I remember being in college 1993&#x2F;1994 and having discussions about the economics of speculatively purchasing domain names. And the economics were certainly not &quot;free&quot;.<p>But I don&#x27;t have a source I can site.

It&#x27;s funny how Bell Atlantic has the 20th oldest domain name ... and they put a hyphen in it.

Where domain names case sensitive then? Names such as &quot;Bell-ATL.com&quot; are listed which use capitals as they please. Is this just so we can recognize the company name more easily or are they actually registered like that?

No Microsoft.com? Late to the party?

Interesting that think.com is owned by Oracle instead of IBM

The Domain Industry needs an enema. I would like to see all those old free domains, that aren&#x27;t trademarks, or being used actively raffled off--and not to the highest bidder. Just an old fashioned raffle to anyone who owns a website.