28 years ago today Symbolics.com was the first domain registered to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the 15th of March 1985.
The second domain name, BBN.com was registered five weeks later on April 24, 1985
It took 2.5 years to reach 100 dot com domains and by 1992, fewer than 15,000 .com domains had been registered. That number has climbed to 144,779,190 as of this post.
On January 17, 1986, the eighth domain was registered as SRI.com to SRI International. SRI is a nonprofit research institute headquartered in Menlo Park, California with a mission of discovery and application of science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace. Originally all domains were recorded in a single file–hosts.txt
–stored on the sri.com server at Stanford Research Institute.
Steve Jobs and the iOS intelligent personal assistant Siri might just have a relationship here.
1. Only six domain names were registered in 1985.
2. Microsoft.com is not in the list of top 100 oldest domain
3. Apple.com was #67.
Unfortunately, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine only goes back to the mid-90s, but even in 1997, you can see how relatively low-tech apple.com looked compared to the snazzy standards we enjoy today.
One of my first paid Internet projects was writing HTML on the Mosaic web browser for BBN Technologies ISP division–BBN Planet–in 1994. This effort was in advance of the world’s earliest ISP being acquired by GTI. This was the very beginning of the commercial Internet.
- GeoPhoto.com domain was registered on 04-Mar-1995
- HooPmedia.com domain was registered on 27-Nov-1996
- Video: History of the Internet
