Gadgetory

the very first dot-com address was created 25 years ago but I bet you don't know what it was I'm Brian Cooley with a scene at top five the original five dot-com domain names number five deck comm September 30th 1985 only us o G tech types remember Digital Equipment Corporation today but it was a heavy hitter from the 60s into the 80s I learned programming on one of their vac system but this isn't an ancient history course deck was sold to Compaq in 98 compact to HP in o2 and that's why deck comm points there today number four MCC comm July 11th of 85 MCC stood for micro electrics and computer technology corporation not really it was a high tech R&D consortium that went poof around the year 2000 or so today it's a sad part domain the only one of our originals that sit there in that forlorn state number three think comm may 24th of 85 by the way notice how like a month used to pass between each comm registration backlund things weren't quite so busy think comm was the home of Thinking Machines an early maker of supercomputers based in Cambridge Mass the last iteration of the company was bought by Oracle in 1999 that's where think.com points today to their think quest teacher-student learning something number two BBN dot-com April 24th of 85 BBN was a legend in the early internet days doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the packet data switching that still powers the net today transmitting the first email and they came up with the at symbol in email addresses today BBN calm points to a Raytheon page because yes they acquired the firm in 2009 before we get to our number one oldest dot-com domain a little trivia dot-com was originally going to be dot core for corporation but you can imagine that might have been misunderstood because it sounds like core or core or core we have the top five first domains here but only six were registered in all of 1985 Northrop comm would be in our list if this show is called top six Microsoft comm not one of the original 100 comm registrations but Apple was at number 64 and sex comm was also not one of the first 100 we had more pure aspirations for the net back then okay now it's time to reveal number one the very first dot-com domain ever registered symbol X comm March 15th 1985 you may not know the company but it was a high-end computer maker that among other things lays claim to making the first computer workstation that supported real time video digital video and HDTV 1985 think about that the next time you fire up Final Cut today Symbolics is owned by a domain brokerage that maintains some kind of a blog there but it's mostly tumbleweeds well that's it for this edition of top five i'm brian coolie from cnet.com registered March 5th 1994 we'll see you next time