what year

PACKERGARE · 01-10-2003, 12:10 PM

i was wondering what years were .com .net and .org were introduced.

**dtobias** · 01-10-2003, 12:43 PM

.com and .org were among the original proposed TLDs when domain names were first devised in 1984; .net joined them a year later when all three were implemented along with .edu, .gov, .mil, and .arpa. The country code domains soon followed.

.int was added around 1989 (and around that time .nato was added but was deleted a few years later due to disuse).

That was all (other than ccTLDs) until the seven new TLDs were added in 2001.

**dtobias** · 01-10-2003, 12:47 PM

Some "pseudo-domains" like .uucp and .bitnet were occasionally used in email addresses in the late '80s and early '90s for users on networks that weren't directly on the Internet but had gateways to and from it, but these were obsoleted eventually as everybody ended up networked to everybody else.

PACKERGARE · 01-10-2003, 01:38 PM

THANKS

**cluelessdomainer** · 01-11-2003, 03:36 PM

a member told be that www.think.com was first registered way back in 1985. can that be true?

**dtobias** · 01-11-2003, 03:48 PM

May 24, 1985, according to the WHOIS record.

**devolution** · 01-12-2003, 06:26 PM

Back in those days... did they little know how big a thing domain names would become!

All that domains were supposed to be for was just organising your computer networks so you could connect up to other networks easily...

**devolution** · 01-13-2003, 07:48 AM

.arpa is still in existence, and used virtually everytime you visit a website or make a connection.
It's the reverse DNS lookup domain. You can't ping anything on .arpa, it is just a kind of placeholder domain.

**dtobias** · 01-13-2003, 08:05 AM

More precisely, "in-addr.arpa" is the reverse DNS lookup domain. The .arpa domain is now officially the "Addresses and Routing Parameters Area" (a "retronym" created after the fact; the original meaning was a reference to the no-longer-existent ARPAnet, for the U.S. Department of Defense's "Advanced Research Projects Agency"). It contains various infrastructure functions of which in-addr.arpa is the most famous and widely used, but a few others also exist like ip6.arpa for the new IPv6 lookups, and another one for the ENUM service (that creates connections between phone numbers and Internet addresses). Recently, uri.arpa and urn.arpa were created in accordance with RFC 3401 through 3404, which defined a new mechanism to resolve arbitrary URI and URN schemes through DNS.

**AQHost** · 01-13-2003, 02:47 PM

If anyone's really interested, the oldest com/net/org domain that I'm aware of is Symbolics.com which was created on 15th March 1985.

Best wishes,
Simon.