The First 10 Businesses that Registered Dot-Com Domains

first 10 businesses that registered dot.com domains

In January 1985, while the pop-music world came together in Hollywood to record “We Are The World” and the political class gathered in D.C. to celebrate the inauguration of Ronald Reagan’s second term, a much less glamorous event took place that would do more to “make a brighter day” and “liberate the spirit of enterprise” than any of these luminaries could have imagined.

This earth-shaking change went practically unnoticed, except by a small elite of geeks and Pentagon officers, for this was the month the U.S. Department of Defense first opened the Domain Name System that would organize the Internet (not to be confused with the World Wide Web, a later development).

The first top-level domain was .arpa, named for the DoD’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was launched in 1958 to respond to the challenge of Sputnik, only to wind up laying the groundwork for the Internet. To this first .arpa TLD six more were soon added: .mil for the military; .gov for government; .edu for universities; .net for network infrastructure; .org for nonprofits; and, of course .com for commercial entities.

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There are many more TLDs now (most of them country codes), but one remains the most popular by far. The neologism dot-com has become synonymous with an epoch-defining revolution in the way we do business. Today, there are over 100 million .com domain names. Here are the first 10 to be registered.

1. Symbolics, Inc.

Symbolics was a Cambridge, Mass.-based company, one of two rival spin-offs founded by MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab hackers (the other was Lisp Machines, Inc.) to commercialize the Lisp programming language developed there, and manufacture computers using it. Symbolics accomplished many great things (before dying a long, slow death — its status is a little hazy to this day), but it achieved immortality, at least for trivia buffs, when it registered symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. Unfortunately, the ownership of that site lapsed in 2009, but at least someone has kept it online, still heralding it as “The first and oldest .com on the Internet.”

2. Bolt, Beranek and Newman

MIT professors Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt founded BBN in 1948 as an acoustics company, consulting on the design of symphony halls such as Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York. They were later summoned before Congress to examine both JFK assassination evidence and the Watergate tapes. Meanwhile, they had branched out from acoustical calculations to computing more broadly, helping implement ARPAnet, developing the LOGO programming language, inventing the IP router, and sending the first email, @ sign and all! BBN survives and was purchased by defense contractor Raytheon in 2009. They registered the second .com domain, bbn.com, on April 24, 1985, and use it to this day.

3. Thinking Machines Corporation

Another Massachusetts-based tech company, Thinking Machines was the brainchild of inventor Danny Hillis, who turned his MIT doctoral thesis on parallel supercomputing into a corporation to manufacture these artificially intelligent Connection Machines. The company’s motto? “We’re building a machine that will be proud of us.” When Thinking Machines went bankrupt in 1994, Hillis joined Walt Disney Imagineering, then left to found another company, Applied Minds. Another of his projects is the Long Now Foundation, which is currently working on a full-scale prototype of the Clock of the Long Now, a monumental timepiece built into a mountainside and designed to last for 10,000 years. Think.com, the third .com domain, was registered on May 24, 1985, but now redirects to ThinkQuest, an online learning platform from the nonprofit arm of Oracle Corporation, which owns most parts of what was once Thinking Machines Corporation.

4. Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation

Created to counteract the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI, which in 1982 announced its 10-year “Fifth Generation” plan to build the computer of the future, MCC was not a company but a consortium of computer manufacturers. Though this arrangement was fostered by the Justice Department and the Pentagon, it was technically illegal until the 1984 passage of the National Cooperative Research Act. Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a former Deputy Director of the CIA and Director of the NSA, was chosen to lead the project. Out of 57 candidate cities to host the project, the winner was Austin, Texas, helping to boost the “Silicon Hills” economy and making this the first non-Massachusetts entity on our list. Although in retrospect it’s easy to scoff at the Japanophobia of the 1980s, the tremendous economic and strategic importance of computer technology to the U.S. since that time suggests that the MCC initiative was worth taking. Happily, it was a victim of its own success, disbanding in 2000. Unhappily, MCC.com, the fourth to be registered (on July 11, 1985), now leads nowhere.

5. Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital is a fascinating case study in natural selection amidst a huge paradigm shift. Another MIT spinoff, it formed during World War II to design aircraft control systems. Digital became a mid-century pioneer of the “minicomputer” — which still meant a rather huge machine costing up to $25,000, but was a great step forward from mainframes affordable only to giant companies. At its height in the 1980s, DEC’s 30,000 employees made it the largest private employer in Massachusetts, exceeded only by the state government. What happened? It’s a complex question, but the simple answer is: the personal computer. The PC was largely a West Coast development, nurtured by freewheeling weirdos of whom Steve Jobs was only the most famous, and it caught the business-and-military-focused East Coast companies off their guard (see John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said for a bold elaboration of this thesis). Though Route 128 around Boston remains an important tech region, the strong Massachusetts lean of this list may be surprising to today’s reader, accustomed to the dominance of Silicon Valley. Digital declined until it was sold off in 1998 to Houston-based Compaq, which in turn quickly got swallowed by No. 9 on this list, to whose website DEC.com, registered on Sept. 30, 1985, now redirects.

6. Northrop Corporation

Northrop Corporation was formed in Hawthorne, Calif. in 1939 by aircraft designer Jack Northrop, who long advocated the “flying wing” concept that would eventually provide the sleek triangular shape of the B-2 stealth bomber. Northrop just barely lived long enough to hold a B-2 prototype in his hands before it entered production in 1981. As touching as that image may be, we should temper it by keeping in mind this one. Northrop is a major constituent of the military-industrial complex, about whose “grave implications” President Eisenhower warned us; it merged with Grumman Aerospace in 1994. Northrop.com, registered on Nov. 7, 1985, now leads to Northrop Grumman’s site.

7. Xerox

Founded in Rochester, N.Y., as the Haloid Photographic Company in 1906, Xerox is the first company on this list whose purpose practically any layman could tell you. But in addition to gifting mankind with the ability to photocopy our own butts, Xerox has played a vitally important role in the history of computing. Besides inventing the modern fax machine, Xerox set up the Palo Alto Research Center, where the laser printer, Ethernet, WYSIWYG text editing, the WIMP (“windows, icons, menus, pointer”) graphical user interface and arguably the PC itself, were invented. Steve Jobs famously bought or “borrowed” many of these underexploited concepts after a 1979 visit to PARC, and headhunted many Xerox engineers to help create the Macintosh. Though they must have felt like kicking themselves over that one, Xerox survived the computing revolution intact, and xerox.com, registered Jan. 9, 1986, is still their home online.

8. Stanford Research Institute

SRI was founded by the trustees of Stanford University in 1946 (its first project: to investigate a domestic source of natural rubber) and spun off as its own independent scientific research institute in 1970 (as a response to student protests over DARPA’s connection to the Vietnam War). Over the years, it has helped government and industry with everything from the earliest research on air pollution to determining the best location for Disneyland. The compact disc, the computer mouse, and the inkjet printer were all invented at SRI, and it was one of the first four locations linked by ARPANET. Technically a nonprofit, SRI nonetheless registered a .com on Jan. 17, 1986, instead of a .org; sri.com is in use to this day.

9. Hewlett-Packard

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard gave Silicon Valley its archetypal creation myth in 1939, when they founded Hewlett-Packard in their Palo Alto garage. Their first profitable products were audio oscillators (some of which were purchased by another famous entrepreneur, Walt Disney, for his ambitious Fantasound system that helped make Fantasia a massive financial loss on its original 1940 run). HP continued to produce electronic test instruments before creating its first computer in 1966. Some consider 1968′s Hewlett-Packard 9100A “desktop calculator” the first PC, but Steve Wozniak left HP after they turned down the concept that became the Apple I. Nevertheless, HP stayed on its toes for the rest of the PC revolution, making many valuable innovations and some canny mergers, and is today the largest computer hardware manufacturer in the world, retaining the hp.com address they registered on March 3, 1986.

10. Bellcore

Bell Communications Research, Inc., or Bellcore, was established as a consequence of the August 1982 Modification of Final Judgment in the landmark antitrust case of United States v. AT&T, which broke up the Bell System. Since it was decided that AT&T would keep custody of Bell Labs, the newly independent Baby Bells established their own R&D consortium, originally, called Central Services Organization, Inc., later known as Bellcore. Defense contractor SAIC, Inc. purchased Bellcore in the late 1990s and changed its name to Telcordia Technologies before selling it off again. It’s now owned by Swedish telecom company Ericsson, to whose site visitors are now redirected if they visit bellcore.com. That domain, registered on March 5, 1986, beat out IBM and Sun Microsystems (who would be on this list, had we chosen to disqualify MCC and SRI) by two weeks to become the 10th .com ever registered. That’s right, lovers of exponential functions: with more than 100 million .com domains now in existence, it took American industry almost exactly one whole year to count to 10.

 

Originally posted on OnlineMBA.

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The First 10 Businesses that Registered Dot-Com Domains
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