notANON

I recently came across a list of the first hundred domain names that were registered on the internet.  As cool as it was, there was not a lot of information first off and second, I was curious about how many were still relevant to their original purpose.  For sake of your attention span, I’m going to focus on the first ten names that were ever registered:

1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM Hmmm, sounds kind of familiar but I don’t even recall why.   When you go there today, it’s a parking page that acknowledges that it was the first registered name and states, “We are seeking to develop this into a useful and beneficial organization for the betterment of humanity.”
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM Never heard of this one.  Now it’s a redirect to www.cdl.com which is a Singapore-based real estate conglomerate.
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM This one now points to www.thinkquest.com which is owned by oracle.  At a glance, it’s a bit unclear what their purpose is.  I have to wonder why point such a valuable domain at something like this and not explain it’s purpose a bit better.
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM Clearly another wasted historical domain.  This one points to www.stimulusgrantapproval.com
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM Here is the first one that I legitimately and fondly remember.  DEC was the maker of the Alpha family of processors and MANY other innovations before them.  In their final days, the DEC Alphas were affordable desktop supercomputers.  Affordable should have an asterisk because even the clones I was building in 1997 were roughly $10k but that’s another story.  Unfortunately for the computing world, DEC sold out to Compaq in the late nineties only to be later dissolved by HP which is where the domain now points.
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM This is just a redirect for Northrop-Grumman, a sloppy and nasty redirect at that.  Click the link to see what I mean.
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM Aha!  Here’s the first domain name on the entire list that is A) still relevant B) doesn’t redirect to another URL. 
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM “SRI International is an independent, nonprofit research institute conducting client-sponsored research and development for government agencies, commercial businesses, foundations, and other organizations. SRI also brings its innovations to the marketplace by licensing its intellectual property and creating new ventures.” At least they appear to be the original domain owner.  Oddly, there is ANOTHER SRI which is also a research organization who owns the .org.
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM Love ’em or hate ’em, HP has been around and on the internet for a long time.  This is the second out of all ten domains that still actually points to the same place it always has and is still the same company with the same purpose as in 1986.
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM Bellcore redirects to www.telcordia.com/.

So out of 10 domains, 3 of them still point to the sites they were originally registered to.  Seems like a bit of a waste to me.