cellio: (Monica)
Monica ([personal profile] cellio) wrote2001-12-20 05:11 pm
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a browse down memory lane

Last 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.)
goljerp: Photo of the moon Callisto (Default)

Those were the days...

[personal profile] goljerp 2001-12-20 04:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, BITNET... those were the days... I wonder if I archived any of the E-mails I sent back then... I was young and naive, and didn't think about the historic value of E-mail... sigh...