25 Years of the .com gTLD
104
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the i'm-not-sure-where-to-send-the-hallmark-card dept.
from the i'm-not-sure-where-to-send-the-hallmark-card dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The domain COM was installed as one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet in January 1985. The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15th of March — the 25th anniversary of the day the first .com name was registered. Of the 250 million websites, there are over 80 million active .com sites. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in .com (however, on 27 August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments). That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon. Here is a list of the 100 oldest still-existing registered .com domains."
Re:No .. (Score:5, Informative)
No microsoft.com ?
Microsoft didnae believe in the internet... it was not until the mid 90ies when they realised that it had taken off without them aboard.
Re:No .. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No .. (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft thought the internet was a fad and that everybody would use a Microsoft-branded network (can't remember the name, it was similar to Compuserve or something
The Microsoft Network - MSN - came with win95.
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Informative)
Stargate Information Systems continued to provide community service until 1988.
I LESS THAN THREE the internet archive.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001210223600/www.stargate.com/history.html [archive.org]
Re:They should have kept the price high (Score:5, Informative)
Back in my day, we didn't have to pay for domains. They were free, you just set up a couple of name servers and emailed in a form. I remember sending uunet $50 back then, not for the domain, but for them to set up a couple of name servers to be authoritative for the domain. When I had my own machines on the net, I provided name servers for free so others could get domains without spending a penny.
Re:mcc.com? (Score:4, Informative)
Who were they?
http://web.archive.org/web/19970214020411/http://www.mcc.com/ [archive.org]
the internet archive rocks!
stats are wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why is Slashdot not a .com? (Score:5, Informative)
A Brief History of Slashdot Part 1, Chips & Dips [slashdot.org]
Re:No .. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No .. (Score:3, Informative)
The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet
No, they weren't. AOL and CompuServe, and most of the other online services (not sure about MSN) ran their own proprietary networks, using non-IP protocols.
and all included access to the World Wide Web.
Eventually, yes, but they didn't start out doing that. They all wanted to be The Future Of Online Services, and hoped the internet would go away quietly, or at least stay restricted to educational and government use.
Re:I knew it! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fanboyism (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft's site was registered sometime in the early 90's, as a test site for the Windows TCP/IP stack. Back in the days when you had to use Trumpet Winsock to connect, prior to Windows 95 (which came with Microsoft's Winsock stack). Of course, it had to be prepped for Win95's launch, but until then, it was really just test servers. It only went "live" after another Microsoft employee testing TCP/IP found it was live and traced it down the hall.
http://www.microsoft.com/misc/features/features_flshbk.htm [microsoft.com]