Have you ever wondered what the oldest registered domains on the internet are? Reddit has, and one user from Poland decided to find out and share exactly how he did it.
Software and Network engineer Frederic Cambus has a website almost entirely devoted to his open source projects and has a particular love for OpenBSD. One of his most recent offerings was for those of us who, like him, are interested in DNS and internet history.
As Cambus points out on his site, there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to the oldest extant registered domains online, but it isn’t particularly thorough. So he took matters into his own hands and found hundreds of listings — some of which date back to the mid 1980s.
He has a full breakdown of exactly how he used DDN NIC domain summaries and a whois server query script (to put it very simply) to get the domain lists on his site. It really is worth a read, so I encourage you to give him some well-deserved clicks.
In the meantime, here are the sites that have been published:
.com
Image: Frederic Cambus
.net
Image: Frederic Cambus
.org
Image: Frederic Cambus
It’s a really interesting list, and one that unsurprisingly has the likes of apple.com and intel.com in there. You’ll also find some sad redirects — stargate.com is extremely not what you want it to be.
I would also recommend following the link that this Redditor pointed out:
I hope you have as much fun as I did searching around these old domains. And if you’re interested in checking out some other cool projects thats Frederic Cambus is working on, keep an eye on his website and Twitter feed.