Internet's First Registered Domain Name Sold 137
MojoKid writes "Believe it or not, it wasn't internet.com or dot.com that was acquired when the Internet was young. Instead, it was the somewhat off-the-wall name of symbolics.com. The Symbolics company was the first
to use an internet domain name to guide Internet viewers to its line of Lisp machines, which were single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. XF.com Investments, which is a Missouri-based Internet investments firm, has managed to secure the domain name from its original owner for an undisclosed sum and XF's CEO was quick to proclaim his excitement over the acquisition. It's hard to say why this domain name was the first registered back on March 15, 1985, but for obvious reasons it holds a special place in history. There has been one original owner for nearly 25 years. Over that time, we've seen the Internet grow to the tune of 180,000,000+ registered domains, and thousands more are being added each and every day."
Stallman and symbolics (Score:5, Informative)
That company crops up in various stories. Before Richard Stallman decided to launch the GNU project to give people freedom, he spent two years out-programming Symbolics as punishment for their destruction of MIT's hacker community. Here's where some of the story can be found [faifzilla.org], about half way down.
First .COM, not First Domain (Score:1, Informative)
n/t
Re:Who is the joker who tags every story "story"? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:EPIC FAIL (Score:5, Informative)
Hey, what do you have against Mike Rowe [wikipedia.org]? That guy's an American hero. Not only is he the host of Dirty Jobs [imdb.com], one of the few good shows on Discovery channel (the other being Mythbusters), but he's also a very outspoken supporter of the trades and American blue-collar workers. He's even got a website [mikeroweworks.com] dedicated to the issue of the decline in trades jobs/workers in America, which has been a contributing factor to the collapse of our physical infrastructure.
But, seriously, I absolutely agree with you. The domain name registration system is all fucked up. The registrars (the most successful of which typically have had close ties to the InterNIC/ICANN board) are making a killing already selling virtual goods (it's like printing money). The least they can do is to mitigate domain-squatting and domain-hijacking rather than to cooperate with and try to profit off of helping those scummy companies.
I don't know why being sick of scummy business practices make you a socialist, but if trademarks were abused in the same fashion we'd quickly start running out of legible company or product names. Oh, you want to register a company name that doesn't substitute numbers for letters or incorporate creative misspellings? That will be $5000, please.
I can understand the argument that capitalism is desirable for promoting healthy competition, driving down costs and increases product/service quality. But how do domain squatters/prospectors contribute anything positive to society? By driving the cost of decent domain names up? That benefits only the domain squatters/prospectors. They're the definition of a parasitic establishment—one whose actions benefits only themselves while harming the rest of society and draining its resources.
Re:First .COM, not First Domain (Score:3, Informative)
It says First Domain Name Sold.
No it doesn't and it wasn't sold. Back then all domain names were free for the asking. The title should be "The first registered .com domain name was just sold."
Re:First .COM, not First Domain (Score:3, Informative)
DNS was introduced in the mid-80s. Established internet domains (network, govt, military, universities) transitioned more slowly to the new system via the temporary .arpa TLD [wikipedia.org].
Symbolics [catb.org], on the other hand, jumped on board right away. symbolics.com is the oldest domain name in use today.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Stallman and symbolics (Score:5, Informative)
And here's some more of the story. [danweinreb.org]
You need a history lesson (Score:5, Informative)
Unless you define the internet as the .com name space.
The .com TLD is not the internet name space, but the internet namespace does include the .com TLD, so it standa to reason that a .com domain could be the first registered on the internet.
The .edu name space is older and was just as much the internet.
.arpa, .com, .edu, .gov, .mil and .org TLDs were all established simultaneously in an RFC published in the fall of 1984. None of them is technically older than any of the others. Practically speaking though the first officially registered and functioning domain name on the internet is SYMBOLICS.COM came into being on March 1985, predating the approximately simultaneous registration of several university .edu domains by about a month.
If you want to be pedantic there were perhaps dozens of internet domain names that simultaneously became the "first domain names". These were all .arpa domains and were all temporary. Prior to the establishment of any internet-wide root nameservers resolving hostnames to domain names used a resolver that read a locally stored text file called hosts. The hosts file was generated and maintained centrally by university researchers and manually downloaded by sysadmins to EVERY COMPUTER ON THE INTERNET that needed to resolve hostnames. The "official" hosts file of the internet was flat in structure--there was no defined levels like today. An informal structure was established using hyphens as separators (a host might be named in a pattern like COMPUTERNAME-UNIVERSITYNAME) but there was no standards applied or technical significance to the structure as there is in today's DNS.
When the nameservers came online they were set up with the official hosts file as it existed at that time, within the .arpa TLD. The .arpa TLD was meant to be temporary--it allowed internet hosts to transition to DNS client resolvers from hostname files seamlessly. Config files, databases, etc. may have referred to hosts by name, and by using the temporary .arpa TLD the name resolver could be changed without disruption (note how name resolution works to this day--if you do not use a FQDN your computer appends the supplied hostname to the domain of your own host--since at the beginning all domain names were .arpa this scheme allowed dns resolution to behave exactly like the original hostname file).
All those .arpa domains are gone now--but the .arpa TLD did become permanent--when standards for doing REVERSE lookups were established the domain in-addr.arpa was created. There are a handful of .arpa domains that exist to manage the inner workings of various DNS functions, but .arpa has never been open to domain registrations from the public--all .arpa domains are established through internet standards.
So, though .arpa domains were technically the firs, YOU are wrong and the article summary was RIGHT. symbolics com was the first REGISTERED domain on the entire public internet.
Internet directories (Score:3, Informative)
Re:EPIC FAIL (Score:3, Informative)
I registered utexas.edu on August 13, 1985. At that time the DNS was just getting started. The old ARPANET used static host tables. For a while we had to support both systems which was a bit of a pain.