This is more accurately the 100 oldest .com domains - Wikipedia's list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_re...) includes the list for the other TLDs. For example, it looks like 5 .edu domains were added at the same time as bbn.com was on April 24, 1985.
Even that list is incomplete, as it misses the country-code domains. For example, ucl.ac.uk was in DNS sometime in mid 1985 (http://domainincite.com/2657-was-this-the-first-ever-uk-doma...) But DNS registration wasn't the beginning of domain names - before DNS there was hosts.txt and some "new-style" domain names found their way in there before DNS.
This document ftp://ftp.maths.tcd.ie/src/mail/mmdf-Maths/doc/auth.ps from April 1985 by Steve Kille at UCL includes a server log (page 5) that lists hosts in cambridge.ac.uk, rsre.ac.uk, ukc.ac.uk, and rutherford.ac.uk in use all before the domain names were registered in DNS.
Disclaimer: I've had the same cs.ucl.ac.uk email address since I was a student in Sept 1985. Now I'm feeling old.
It's a bit of #geoffmylawn brag but it was a much smaller community back then.
Looking at those names: I was over at #1 Symbolics quite a bit in those days (a bunch of people from the lab started the company). #3 Thinking Machines was started by my housemate Danny Hillis (I was there quite a bit visiting friends as well). I actually worked for #4 MCC and #7 Xerox (PARC in my case). I started Cygnus with John Gilmore (#84 Toad) who was previously the first employee at #12 Sun (where other founder Tiemann had also worked).
Many of the other companies on that list hold fond memories as well. Amazing!
At 35 I'm not sure I qualify for greybeard status (perhaps relatively), but when you write something like this is there some illusion that everyone reading a tech piece is under 25?
Unfortunately the original was much more hacker friendly and awesome. Lisp Machines! They sold it off several years ago and now live here: http://www.symbolics-dks.com/
And that site is downright embarrassing. It reminds me of the way a very different but still excellent kind of older software, Delphi, went after it lost steam and was sold off by Borland: it went to people who milked it for all it was worth while putting as little into it as possible.
my "awesome" referenced more of the product they were selling than the website they were/are running. But yes, they lost to Unix / AI winter and all the money dried up.
I have a 50 Mbps connection. After 1 minute and 10 seconds, it has loaded 3.6 MB and is still displaying a white spinning wheel on a beautiful blue background. Amazing.
Given that this list spans a little over two years, I'm surprised to see no microsoft.com, all the other tech giants at the time are pretty much in here.
Creation dates are from the most recent domain creation record, and can be reset from a domain ownership transfer. I lost my precious domain creation date of September 1993 when I transfered my domain from the ISP who registered it /in their own name/ (argh) to my own ownership in 1998.
Glad to see we (HP) have a pretty old one and we have DEC as well, I'm guessing we're the biggest holder of class A addresses. Now we're splitting so it'll be interesting to see how that gets distributed.
There are some real gems in there. mentat.com and then there's entity.com a resume of sorts for Marty Connor who is now apparently the Corporate Operations Engineer at Google.
Pretty interesting. Number 49 (Tandy), brings back some nostalgia. Tandy was the first computer I had growing up and the first machine I learn to program on.
Yes, famously. Bill Gates sent his "Internet Tidal Wave" memo in 1995 and admitted they were behind:
Some competitors have a much deeper involvement in the Internet than
Microsoft. All UNIX vendors are benefiting from the Internet since the
default server is still a UNIX box and not Windows NT, particularly for
high end demands, SUN has exploited this quite effectively.
[...]
Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats. After 10
hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows
.EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format.
[...]
A new competitor “born” on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is
dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network
extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where
they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating
system.
> I find adobe.com really interesting. What were they doing back then?
Adobe was founded by ex-Xerox PARC employees, so perhaps not surprisingly their first couple of successes were printing related: PostScript and Type 1 fonts in 1982 and 1984, respectively. By 1986 they were working in desktop publishing with the development of Illustrator.
Prepress industry was an early adopter for the internet. Not that surprising that Adobe, whose postscript format as fundamental to that shift to electronic transmission of printable artifacts, were early to the net.