Earliest domain names

cbk · Mar 30, 2011

What is the link between nordu.net, symbolics.com and Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris, Berkeley, Kevin Dunlap, the unix implementation?

Who did symbolics and nordu contact to register?
How did they register?
How did they know to register a domain name first?
How did that scenerio go down?

SiberForum · Mar 30, 2011

Don't you think that is the question which better to ask from the current owner of the domain name?

draggar · Mar 30, 2011

You forgot one critical piece of technology - ARPANET. Berkley was the second university to work on it's development (the third was MIT who is often given credit for its creation). The backbone of it was Unix (like how DOS runs in the background of most Windows environments).

John Postel wrote the "ARPANET Protocol Handbook" - which set many of the standards (still used in some sense today) as well as designed a lot of these protocols.

Paul Mockapetrisis credited for "inventing" domain names.

I don't think they went to a registrar to register domains, I'm sure they knew the system well enough to be able to create their own domain names and be able to reserve the specific IP addresses for those domains. Registries wasn't needed until the US government started to intervene with the ARPANET.