25 Years of the .com gTLD

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."

Interesting and maybe humbling

[93 Escort Wagon]

I felt a bit old, and maybe a bit humbled, to see a number of smallish Pacific Northwest companies that are on that list but no longer exist. When I first got out of college I'd interviewed at some of those places!

Fanboyism

[Yvanhoe]

Apple is there.
Microsoft is not.

Alcoa is 40th oldest?!

[jschen]

I find it surprising that Alcoa is so high up the list, beating out big computer and communications tech names such as AMD, 3COM, Apple, and Cisco. I'm curious as to what compelled them to register a domain name way back in Nov 1986.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[MrCawfee]

Godaddy had the 9.95 price point when their competition was ~25/yr, and it wasn't immediate. .CO is the .new .CM. I work at a registrar and almost all of our .CM registrations tend to be screened out using fake credit cards. Even after it goes live and the price point for .CO is probally going to be ~60/yr, that is still too expensive for the "legitimate" squatter to put up their advertising pages. Judging from the .CM registrations at my company that got through the screening process, they tend to be deleted within a few months when the credit card dispute comes through. The registry doesn't care because they have already gotten their registration fee. I'd say that atleast 50% of our .CM registrations are screened out as fraud automatically, and the remainder are a mix between companies trying for brand protection and fraud. .CO will never be a big legitimate tld, my feeling is that you are going to see:
    a) .CO domains parked or forwarded by legitimate users for brand protection
    b) .CO domains parked by the registrar due to a chargeback so they can get atleast some of the money they lost back.
    c) .CO domains parked by the client until the company that owns the name goes through the dispute process.

Bad thing for the internet, good thing for Columbia, good for .

Re:Interesting and maybe humbling

[frank_adrian314159]

Which ones are you talking about? Both Fluke and Tektronix still exist (though the latter not in its former glory) and Boeing was still in business last time I checked (albeit with HQ now in Chicago). As is Mentor Graphics, etc., etc. And I've actually worked for a couple of those...

Re:They should have kept the price high

[HaeMaker]

I don't remember it being $100. When I registered hae.com, it was $30 one time to my ISP (InterNIC didn't charge) to setup the domain, DNS, and sendmail. Other ISPs charged per month to maintain the domain, so it was a good deal. This was back in the mid 90s when it was fashionable to get a "vanity plate" domain.

Re:They should have kept the price high

[Ron Atkinson]

I don't remember it ever being $100, you probably paid for 2 years. When I got my first domain name in the early 90's before the commercialization of the Internet domain name registration was free. I had my name for a couple of years at no charge (also had a class C subnet assigned to me, which I turned back in last year to ARIN). After the InterNIC transferred from SRI over to Network Solutions (think it was 1994 or so), and the Internet became commercial, the government decided to charge $50 for domain names in which $35 went to Network Solutions and $15 to the U.S. Government. After I think 2 years or so it was determined that the $15 could be considered an illegal tax, so that was revoked leaving the standard $35 Network Solutions fee.

I also agree that the downfall of the domain name registration was when it was passed to ICANN. People may have complained about the $35, but we didn't have squatters and people hijacking names just because someone forgot to "pay the bill".

Re:Interesting and maybe humbling

[93 Escort Wagon]

The two that immediately jumped out at me were Teltone and Data I/O. Technically both still exist; but after buyouts, bankruptcies, and acquisitions I don't believe either one has anything to do with the original companies other than some continuity of legal rights to the names. I had an internship at Teltone way back in the early 80s.

I don't think of Fluke nor Tektronix as being smallish, really - although I realize compared to ATT or IBM they are. And Boeing is huge by almost any standard.

Stock performance

[bobdotorg]

I'm curious how the publicly traded stocks of the early adopters fared from time of registration until the peak of the dotcom bubble in March 2000. I suspect abnormally high returns relative to Nasdaq or the S&P500.

Why is Slashdot not a .com?

[mister_playboy]

This story makes me wonder... does anyone know why /. is a .org and not a .com?

Northrup == oldest surviving?

[kclittle]

Looking at that oldest-100 list, it would appear that Northrup is the oldest surviving ".COM" TLD (they were the acquirer in the Grumman deal).
Ah, DEC, we knew ye well...

Re:No ..

[W3bbo]

Not quite so true, I'm afraid.

Whilst Microsoft was late to the party (we're talking early-1990s) they never had the impression they could supplant the Internet with something proprietary.

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 and all included access to the World Wide Web.

So basically MSN (the original one) was Microsoft's competitor to AOL and not "The Internet".

Microsoft didn't include TCP/IP in early versions of Windows because there just wasn't any demand, and third-parties were already making their own add-ons that provided this. Much the same reason IPv6 wasn't added to Windows until Vista even though IPv6's specifications were stable enough by the release of XP SP2 in 2005. I'm sure they had better things at the time for their developers to work on.