Oldest .com Domains Registered on the Internet
theforrester.wordpress.comEach of these has a story behind them. Some were getting DOD money, so of course they joined.
Spdcc is Steven Dyer, a big name in Usenet and always on the cutting edge… also openly gay which was rare then.
The list shows who the big computer vendors of the day were: HP, IBM, DEC etc. none of those companies exist any more (just kidding… but not really).
1986ish was when the concept of a workstation was new. The list embodies that movement. (The MIT project that galvanized a lot of that is an an interesting story). All involved have domains.
So many of these companies are gone. Each has a story and a lesson to learn.
Who isn’t on the list is interesting. Microsoft. They ignored the internet for years. AT&T ignored the internet but someone in R&D registers the domain.
What was stargate.com in 1985?
The first domain I registered was my employer, att.com. Since “&” was not allowed in the syntax, I had to choose between att.com and at-t.com, and that choice was mirrored in future domains. The second domain registered was stargate.com, used by the UUCP Project, the UUCP Zone (the registrar) and the Stargate project (Usenet over satellite.)
More about this effort is in the Stargate Internet Museum web site.
https://maryannhorton.com/mary-ann-horton/a-career-in-comput...
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