There was domain-style addressing that predated domains like ".com" and ".edu". The original top-level domains were ".arpa" (for ARPANET) and ".mil" (for MILNET).
Symbolics was "symbolics.arpa" before it was "symbolics.com".
So instead of "the first domain name was registered", maybe it would be more accurate to say "the first registration of a domain name with a registry took place"?
DISTRIBUTION
One copy only will be sent from the author's site to"
1. Bob Kahn, BB&N
2. Larry Roberts, ARPA
3. Steve Carr, UCLA
4. Jeff Rulifson, UTAH
5. Ron Stoughton, UCSB
6. Steve Crocker, UCLA
Reproduction if desired may be handled locally.
Before the Internet there was Usenet and a world-wide network network of machines connected together via UUCP, doing email and such over point-to-point dialup (modem) links. Sending mail was a matter of knowing a complete path through the network from your source machine to the recipient's destination machine (and Usenet news implemented public discussion groups over this network). If I recall correctly, you could send specially formatted email messages to the server where the RFCs lived, and an autoresponder program would read your message and email back the requested RFCs.
No, that was a network, but it was very much not the Internet. Different technologies.
Per Wikipedia, "The Internet (portmanteau of interconnected network) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide."
The network of UUCP-connected machines (also called UUCPNET) did not use TCP/IP and had no inbuilt notion of how to get packets from one place to another. One had to specifically list a set of instructions, a path, from source to destination hosts. UUCPNET was entirely store-and-forward, and sent entire messages, not packets. And it was in wide use throughout the 80's before the Internet became a thing (which happened once researchers started interconnecting networks that used TCP/IP).
To say that UUCPNET was the Internet just without the web, is like saying that radio _is_ TV, just without the pictures.
This is quickly going to devolve into semantics, but just because the Internet today is built on TCP/IP doesn't mean that's a requirement to be considered "internet". An internet is just a WAN between LANs, and I don't think it matters what specific Layer 3/4 protocol you choose. ARPANET is widely acknowledged as the predecessor of what we today call "the Internet" and it predates TCP/IP.
What was the process of registering a domain name at that time? I've often dreamed about going back in time to when I was a kid and registering a bunch of domains before 1995. What would have been involved?
What does he do with it? The page you get is a simple 'x' only.
I am hoping he has loads of stuff on hidden urls, and uses it for personal email or something. If he's just sitting on it doing nothing, then that's just plain wrong.
X.com is one of the few single-character domain names that created before IANA’s restriction of single-letter and single-digit domain names registration in December 1993.
Strictly speaking, the Space Cadet keyboard was JLK's creation (John L Kulp, who ran the MIT Plasma Labs computing facilities, and who went on to help found Symbolics when they split off from the AI Lab).
I had a Space Cadet on my desk in the EECS department along with a Plasma TV system monitor.
Had fun times hacking the PDP-11 software driving the Plasma TV system.
As gumby says, the Space Cadet keyboards, being Microswitch Hall effect-based, were a bit spongy due to the big plastic case, but the switches themselves were dreamy.
By the way, after 40 years of despairing over the loss of Hall effect switches (I nursed a Space Cadet Livermore Labs clone from a group buy for some years into the mid-80's), there are now two keyboards using this technology, and I'm loving the one that's actually available.
The CADR space cadet had a spongy feel, probably because of the large size and plastic case. A sad dependent of the Knight TV keyboards. With the 3600 series Symbolics replaced that with a solid keyboard (fewer keys though) that was more satisfying to type on.
Some of those keys like thumbs up/down etc were never really used anyway.
Not sure about UUCP specifically, but a persistent problem until the introduction of DNS seems to have been that various places in the network sometimes had different names for a single host. Check out the discussion referenced from RFC 298, “What we hope is an official list of host names”: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc289.html
Thank you, interesting link. I had for a long time thought symbolics.com was the first "modern style" domain to have been registered, but it looks like it was actually nordu.net, even if the intention was to use it for a root server.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc882
There was domain-style addressing that predated domains like ".com" and ".edu". The original top-level domains were ".arpa" (for ARPANET) and ".mil" (for MILNET).
Symbolics was "symbolics.arpa" before it was "symbolics.com".