a browse down memory lane
Dec. 20th, 2001 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioLast night at a social gathering, my friend Chris told us about a piece of spam he'd gotten that day. It started out: "Remember the .com rollout?" (They were selling domain names.) Chris' comment was "no, actually, I don't". I said I did, and I vaguely thought it was in the mid-80s. (I graduated from college in 1984, and I thought it was around then.) Chris and Dani challenged me on this and argued that it was much earlier and my memory was faulty.
From the Hobbes Internet timeline:
1985:
Symbolics.com is assigned on 15 March to become the first registered domain. Other firsts: cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, berkeley.edu, ucla.edu, rutgers.edu, bbn.com (24 Apr); mit.edu (23 May); think.com (24 may); css.gov (June); mitre.org, .uk (July)
I tried to figure out where to find really old saved email (that would show From lines), and wandered over to the archive page for the SF-Lovers digest. A randomly-selected digest from the first year (1980) shows machine names like decwrl.ARPA and CMU-CS-G (no domain). I think, now that the memory has been triggered, that I participated in that mailing list from CMU-C (though there's no search option for the archive, and I only posted a few times, and I'm not about to go hunting).
So there. :-)
By the way, the number of ARPAnet hosts only broke 1000 in 1984. (That might include Milnet, which had been split out by then, but I'm not sure.)
From the Hobbes Internet timeline:
1985:
Symbolics.com is assigned on 15 March to become the first registered domain. Other firsts: cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, berkeley.edu, ucla.edu, rutgers.edu, bbn.com (24 Apr); mit.edu (23 May); think.com (24 may); css.gov (June); mitre.org, .uk (July)
I tried to figure out where to find really old saved email (that would show From lines), and wandered over to the archive page for the SF-Lovers digest. A randomly-selected digest from the first year (1980) shows machine names like decwrl.ARPA and CMU-CS-G (no domain). I think, now that the memory has been triggered, that I participated in that mailing list from CMU-C (though there's no search option for the archive, and I only posted a few times, and I'm not about to go hunting).
So there. :-)
By the way, the number of ARPAnet hosts only broke 1000 in 1984. (That might include Milnet, which had been split out by then, but I'm not sure.)
Those were the days...
Date: 2001-12-20 04:32 pm (UTC)