[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Dave Horsfall]

The first Internet domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985 at 0500Z 
("Zulu" time, i.e. UTC).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Pete Wright]

On 03/14/2018 14:14, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> The first Internet domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985 at 
> 0500Z ("Zulu" time, i.e. UTC).
>

This was well before my time, so pardon my ignorance here, but who was 
the registrar that they used to register this domain?

thanks!
-pete


-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Angus Robinson]

According to wikipoedia, .com was setup in January of 1985 and was
administered by the US Department of Defense. Although they contracted SRI
International, which in turn created DDN-NIC (SRI-NIC), which was found at
nic.ddn.mil.

Assuming they registered it under SRI-NIC.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 2:18 PM Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 03/14/2018 14:14, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > The first Internet domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985 at
> > 0500Z ("Zulu" time, i.e. UTC).
> >
>
> This was well before my time, so pardon my ignorance here, but who was
> the registrar that they used to register this domain?
>
> thanks!
> -pete
>
>
> --
> Pete Wright
> pete at nomadlogic.org
> @nomadlogicLA
>
>
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Pete Wright]

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On 03/14/2018 15:14, Angus Robinson wrote:
> According to wikipoedia, .com was setup in January of 1985 and was 
> administered by the US Department of Defense. Although they contracted 
> SRI International, which in turn created DDN-NIC (SRI-NIC), which was 
> found at nic.ddn.mil <http://nic.ddn.mil>.
>
> Assuming they registered it under SRI-NIC.
>
interesting - thanks!  this makes sense in hindsight :)

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Michael Kjörling]

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On 15 Mar 2018 08:14 +1100, from dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall):
> The first Internet domain, symbolics.com,

What qualifies as an "Internet domain" in this context? I'm honestly
curious about the definition you're using.

Poking at RFCs at random, RFC 820 mentions mailboxes with SMTP-style
(as opposed to e.g. UUCP) addresses, but with only a single label as
the hostname (for example, "KLH at NIC" or "Hinden at BBN-Unix"). That one
is dated January 1983.

The August 1982 (!?) RFC 821 has example SMTP conversations that use
addresses on the form foo at bar.ARPA. So the concept of domain names
similar to today certainly existed before 1985, and the DNS RFCs
(initially 1034, 1035) were only published in 1987...

So by what definition would symbolics.com in 1985 be the first
Internet domain registered?

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
  “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person
              is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Arthur Krewat]

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The key might be in the definition/timing of the term "Internet".

;)



On 3/14/2018 6:23 PM, Michael Kjörling wrote:
> On 15 Mar 2018 08:14 +1100, from dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall):
>> The first Internet domain, symbolics.com,
> What qualifies as an "Internet domain" in this context? I'm honestly
> curious about the definition you're using.
>
> Poking at RFCs at random, RFC 820 mentions mailboxes with SMTP-style
> (as opposed to e.g. UUCP) addresses, but with only a single label as
> the hostname (for example, "KLH at NIC" or "Hinden at BBN-Unix"). That one
> is dated January 1983.
>
> The August 1982 (!?) RFC 821 has example SMTP conversations that use
> addresses on the form foo at bar.ARPA. So the concept of domain names
> similar to today certainly existed before 1985, and the DNS RFCs
> (initially 1034, 1035) were only published in 1987...
>
> So by what definition would symbolics.com in 1985 be the first
> Internet domain registered?
>

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[George Michaelson]

the key might be in the meaning of the word 'register'

getting into a honeydanber database used to be as simple as posting
news with structured text.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Arthur Krewat]

On 3/14/2018 6:52 PM, George Michaelson wrote:
> the key might be in the meaning of the word 'register'
>
> getting into a honeydanber database used to be as simple as posting
> news with structured text.
>
Quite true.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Warner Losh]

nic.ddn.mil post-dated symbolics.com registering by a couple of years. They
had a complicated form to fill out to get a domain name after the less
formal system became too burdensome to scale.

Warner

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 4:14 PM, Angus Robinson <angus at fairhaven.za.net>
wrote:

> According to wikipoedia, .com was setup in January of 1985 and was
> administered by the US Department of Defense. Although they contracted SRI
> International, which in turn created DDN-NIC (SRI-NIC), which was found at
> nic.ddn.mil.
>
> Assuming they registered it under SRI-NIC.
>
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 2:18 PM Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 03/14/2018 14:14, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> > The first Internet domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985 at
>> > 0500Z ("Zulu" time, i.e. UTC).
>> >
>>
>> This was well before my time, so pardon my ignorance here, but who was
>> the registrar that they used to register this domain?
>>
>> thanks!
>> -pete
>>
>>
>> --
>> Pete Wright
>> pete at nomadlogic.org
>> @nomadlogicLA
>>
>>
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[George Michaelson]

I was at UCL-CS when we turned on DNS in 85/6 -This was the eastern
end of the spiral arm of the galaxy, feeding MoD and Goonhilly downs
and the Post Office, as well as a rather odd service mapping ARPAnet
to JANET via kermit amongst other things.  Smoke filled rooms with
spooks in dark glasses and men with ribbon-chest-boards were mentioned
in passing when UCL staff went to SRI for meetings. Odd times. I never
went. Bob Braden came over for some liaison meeting at the end of
SATNET (2meg satlink, huge for the day) and was grumpy because due
deference was not shown. Mike Lesk came for a long residency. he was
nice, chatty, obsessed with Tristram Shandy. I liked him more.

At one level, "nothing happened" because mail and news still flowed as
it used to. But random connects in FTP and Telnet now had subtly
different underpinnings. Before this turn-on, when we used
/etc/hosts.txt in anger we could wind up being delayed beyond the 30
second login timer and fail to connect for service because lookups
files timed out. After this turn-on, we connected more reliably more
often.  I was doing OSI code work, and had to share some files with
people at BRL and UDel and other places, it was a real pain in the
neck.

The fuzzball had been turned off in favour of a BBN butterfly. oooooh
multiprocessing. sexy. Also flakey as hell.

I had root on some of the boxes, two or three flicks of configuration
changed from one t'other and back again.  It was hard to get excited
about it because ubiquitous meant still having serial-line
communications with UUCP and dealing with Jacob Palme in his
not-quite-USENET world of research mailing lists, and bitnet.  mmdf
and news looks the same if you ship the bytes on tape, in the end.

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 9:22 AM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> nic.ddn.mil post-dated symbolics.com registering by a couple of years. They
> had a complicated form to fill out to get a domain name after the less
> formal system became too burdensome to scale.
>
> Warner
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 4:14 PM, Angus Robinson <angus at fairhaven.za.net>
> wrote:
>>
>> According to wikipoedia, .com was setup in January of 1985 and was
>> administered by the US Department of Defense. Although they contracted SRI
>> International, which in turn created DDN-NIC (SRI-NIC), which was found at
>> nic.ddn.mil.
>>
>> Assuming they registered it under SRI-NIC.
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 2:18 PM Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 03/14/2018 14:14, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>> > The first Internet domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985 at
>>> > 0500Z ("Zulu" time, i.e. UTC).
>>> >
>>>
>>> This was well before my time, so pardon my ignorance here, but who was
>>> the registrar that they used to register this domain?
>>>
>>> thanks!
>>> -pete
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Pete Wright
>>> pete at nomadlogic.org
>>> @nomadlogicLA
>>>
>

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Warner Losh]

Sorry to reply to myself....

But for a few years after we started registering names, requests went to
hostmaster at sri-nic.arpa. Around 1987 or so, a big email came out that said
you had to go through hostmaster at nic.ddn.mil to get them, and you needed to
fill out an email form that was programmatically parsed. I recall from the
day that getting domains registers was a hit-or-miss sort of affair, since
the parser was super picky. I know a friend missed out on grue.com because
his first attempt had some misplaced word and by the time he heard back and
redid it, someone else had jumped in line in front of him...

Warner

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 5:22 PM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> nic.ddn.mil post-dated symbolics.com registering by a couple of years.
> They had a complicated form to fill out to get a domain name after the less
> formal system became too burdensome to scale.
>
> Warner
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 4:14 PM, Angus Robinson <angus at fairhaven.za.net>
> wrote:
>
>> According to wikipoedia, .com was setup in January of 1985 and was
>> administered by the US Department of Defense. Although they contracted SRI
>> International, which in turn created DDN-NIC (SRI-NIC), which was found at
>> nic.ddn.mil.
>>
>> Assuming they registered it under SRI-NIC.
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 2:18 PM Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 03/14/2018 14:14, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>> > The first Internet domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985 at
>>> > 0500Z ("Zulu" time, i.e. UTC).
>>> >
>>>
>>> This was well before my time, so pardon my ignorance here, but who was
>>> the registrar that they used to register this domain?
>>>
>>> thanks!
>>> -pete
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Pete Wright
>>> pete at nomadlogic.org
>>> @nomadlogicLA
>>>
>>>
>
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Tony Finch]

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Michael Kjörling <michael at kjorling.se> wrote:
>
> So by what definition would symbolics.com in 1985 be the first
> Internet domain registered?

As I understand it, the old hosts.txt registrations got grandfathered into
the DNS in the .arpa zone - they were ARPANET hosts (e.g. see RFC 921).
The modern structure was set up after the transition to IP, so it's fair
to call .com and friends Internet domains. (See RFC 920.)

But it looks like there were a bunch of .edu and .gov names before
Symbolics.

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
Northeast Viking, North Utsire: Southeasterly 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8 in
south, decreasing 4 at times in north. Moderate or rough in northern and
eastern North Utsire, otherwise rough or very rough. Fair. Good.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Tony Finch]

Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
>
> This was well before my time, so pardon my ignorance here, but who was
> the registrar that they used to register this domain?

Registrars are a late 1990s concept :-) They are a consequence of the
effort to break up the Network Solutions monopoly - the IAHC and the
foundation of ICANN. (Another consequence was the introduction of new
TLDs.) The early technical mechanism underpinning this policy decision was
the registry-registrar protocol (RRP, RFC 2832) which has a much more
straightforward name (and design) than its successor EPP, the extensible
provisioning protocol.

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
Northeast Viking, North Utsire: Southeasterly 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8 in
south, decreasing 4 at times in north. Moderate or rough in northern and
eastern North Utsire, otherwise rough or very rough. Fair. Good.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2018, Tony Finch wrote:

> As I understand it, the old hosts.txt registrations got grandfathered 
> into the DNS in the .arpa zone - they were ARPANET hosts (e.g. see RFC 
> 921). The modern structure was set up after the transition to IP, so 
> it's fair to call .com and friends Internet domains. (See RFC 920.)

Yeah, I was referring to DNS as opposed to HOSTS.TXT of course.

> But it looks like there were a bunch of .edu and .gov names before 
> Symbolics.

I'm happy to be corrected/updated; I happen to have an interest in geeky 
history (as if that wasn't apparent).

> -- 
> f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
> Northeast Viking, North Utsire: Southeasterly 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8 in
> south, decreasing 4 at times in north. Moderate or rough in northern and
> eastern North Utsire, otherwise rough or very rough. Fair. Good.

OK, I'll bite: how do you do this?

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Tony Finch]

Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> OK, I'll bite: how do you do this?

A script that massages the data from the Met Office Shipping Forecast and
prints it into a named pipe which my MUA reads from.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/data/CoreProductCache/ShippingForecast/Latest
It's XML now, but when I started using this .sig the data looked like it
was coming from a system designed for distributing the forecast via telex.
(Radio telex to ships maybe?)

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey: Southerly or southeasterly, 4 or 5 at first
in south Rockall, otherwise 6 to gale 8. Moderate in east Malin and east
Hebrides, otherwise rough or very rough, occasionally high at first in
Hebrides and Bailey. Rain at times. Moderate or good.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Tim Bradshaw]

I think it is maybe NAVTEX or some ancestor of that.  Somewhere there are still warnings that the shipping forecast via the internet is not to be relied on: the one transmitted by NAVTEX or equivalent is (as well as, perhaps, the voice one on LW), and that version always gets out (well, if it doesn't it's because the Met Office is a radioactive hole in the ground).

--tim
> On 16 Mar 2018, at 09:51, Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:
> 
> Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>> 
>> OK, I'll bite: how do you do this?
> 
> A script that massages the data from the Met Office Shipping Forecast and
> prints it into a named pipe which my MUA reads from.
> http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/data/CoreProductCache/ShippingForecast/Latest
> It's XML now, but when I started using this .sig the data looked like it
> was coming from a system designed for distributing the forecast via telex.
> (Radio telex to ships maybe?)
> 
> Tony.
> -- 
> f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
> Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey: Southerly or southeasterly, 4 or 5 at first
> in south Rockall, otherwise 6 to gale 8. Moderate in east Malin and east
> Hebrides, otherwise rough or very rough, occasionally high at first in
> Hebrides and Bailey. Rain at times. Moderate or good.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 5:04 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Mar 2018, Tony Finch wrote:
>
> As I understand it, the old hosts.txt registrations got grandfathered into
>> the DNS in the .arpa zone - they were ARPANET hosts (e.g. see RFC 921). The
>> modern structure was set up after the transition to IP, so it's fair to
>> call .com and friends Internet domains. (See RFC 920.)
>>
>
> Yeah, I was referring to DNS as opposed to HOSTS.TXT of course.
>
> But it looks like there were a bunch of .edu and .gov names before
>> Symbolics.
>>
>
> I'm happy to be corrected/updated; I happen to have an interest in geeky
> history (as if that wasn't apparent).



​Well this history is sort of strange because it was more random/back
patched than the historian likes to admit.  For instance DEC definitely had
an ARPAnet connection and I think IBM did also. Note Tektronix and HP did
not have ARPAnet connections, but Tek was a very early UUCP site and HP
followed suite about 2 years later.

As others have pointed out the ARPANETname space was a tad more flat:
user at site and SITE was sort of large (MIT, CMU, DEC) - which originally
mapped to IMPs.    Different networks (like SAT-NET) started to strain the
naming scheme. As Ron reminded us, with the coming of the splitting off the
DoD to DDN's responsibility and the creation of MIL-Net people began to
talk about needing more that 'site.'

Hence the creation of responsibility 'domains' ​-- which (as I recall) was
less for SW naming and more for administrative control.

Their a a number of salient points here.  First there was no real
registration as we think of today.   For instance, I was personally
assigned ccc.com because I had been 'ccc' on the UUCP net, and I was
already moving packets around from UUCP and to Arpa/Internet folks via
gateways.

It was confusing time and a lot of different networks had bridges/email
gateways.  At that time, my friends at BBN just put me in the database long
before I was directly connected or assigned my own Class C network (which
happened a few years later).   This allowed ARPAnet, CS-Net etc to send
emails to me the gateway point was defined in the BBN database for MMDF
(not sendmail BTW) -- I've forgotten where all that name washing got done
-- it might have been BBN proper, but somehow I think UDEL was in the
middle of some of that [someone like Ron might remember].

Adding sites like me was done because BBN was trying to 'flatten' some of
the UUCP naming mess on their side (the message on the 'user' part of the
ARPA addresses was a wash with funny characters - like !, % etc to try to
slime in the different gateways].

A key thing to remember here, is that all happened before Symbolics was
incorporated.  And I was 'late' compared to others.   In fact 'Tektronix'
was running IP internally but used UUCP for external email as they could
not get an ARPAnet connection.  They later would joined CS-NET and used
Phone Net when that was first allowed and finally they were an early
'commercial' IP site that BBN connected with Cisco gear.

It should also be pointed out that since DEC was existed on the ARPAnet and
was grandfathered as DEC.Com (and I believe IBM the same) - this is all
long before Symbolics.Com was created.  So it's hard to really call
Symbolics 'first' other than to say the were probably the first firm to ask
BBN how do we do this and make it formal, right around the time when DoD
was trying to get out of the ARPAnet and was trying to find a way to
transition it to commercial firms.

For whatever it is worth, I also remember being ticked off when I got my
first bill years later from Network Solutions because at some point, the
BBN/SRI databases came under their control.   I had been CCC.COM for a long
number of years by then (5-10 maybe) and what was this all about.

Clem
ᐧ
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2018, Tony Finch wrote:

[ Tony's weather .sig ]

> It's XML now, but when I started using this .sig the data looked like it 
> was coming from a system designed for distributing the forecast via 
> telex. (Radio telex to ships maybe?)

Yes; weather forecasts are rather important to a ship in the North Sea :-)

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dave Horsfall

    > he would've been the registraNT, no?

Symbolics was the registrant.

I may have spoken too soon, Postel/ISI might not have been the registrar when
".com" was set up, so maybe it was someone at SRI/NIC. (The memory is dim.) I
don't remember how "MIT.EDU" got registered - I'm not sure if I did it. It
was definitely Jon handing out addresses, not SRI - I do recall us going to
Jon to get 128.30 & 31.

	Noel

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Noel Chiappa]

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    > From: Michael Kjörling

    > the DNS RFCs (initially 1034, 1035) were only published in 1987...

Ah, those were later versions; the originals were:

  0882 Domain names: Concepts and facilities. P.V. Mockapetris. November
     1983.
  0883 Domain names: Implementation specification. P.V. Mockapetris.
     November 1983.

Both were updated by RFC0973 before being replaced by 1034/1035.

You might also want to look at:

  0881 Domain names plan and schedule. J. Postel. November 1983.
  0897 Domain name system implementation schedule. J. Postel. February 1984.
  0921 Domain name system implementation schedule - revised. J. Postel. October 1984. 

Note that ".com" didn't exist in the early revs.

     Noel

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote:

>    > who was the registrar that they used to register this domain?
>
> Postel (or one of his minions).

If so, he would've been the registraNT, no?

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Pete Wright

    > who was the registrar that they used to register this domain?

Postel (or one of his minions).

       Noel