The history of the Domain Name

You type them every day without thinking about it: weboke.nl, wikipedia.org, google.com. But where does such a domain name actually come from? Who came up with the idea that computers should get a name, which extension was first, and which domain name was number one in the entire world? In this article we take you on a journey from a telephone on a desk in California to today's more than 400 million domain names. Along the way we'll pass a beer coaster, a computer the size of a refrigerator, and a Dutchman who registered ten thousand domain names by hand.

Before the domain name: one list for the entire internet

In the seventies, the internet didn't exist yet. There was ARPANET, a network of a few dozen computers belonging to universities and the American Department of Defense. Every computer had a number, and because nobody can remember numbers, they were also given a name. Those names were kept in a single text file: HOSTS.TXT.

That file was maintained by Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler and her team at the Network Information Center at SRI in California. Wanted to connect a new computer or change a name? Then you called the NIC during office hours, and Jake or a colleague entered it. After that, every computer on the network had to re-download the entire file. As long as there were a few hundred computers, that worked fine. Around 1983 there were so many computers that the file changed almost daily, names got in each other's way, and just downloading it ate up a substantial part of the network traffic.

1983: Paul Mockapetris draws a tree

The solution came from Paul Mockapetris, a researcher at the University of Southern California. In November 1983 he described the Domain Name System in two documents, RFC 882 and RFC 883. His colleague Jon Postel, who kept track of the internet's numbers and names, had asked him to merge five competing proposals into one system.

Mockapetris's idea is actually quite simple: instead of one list that everyone has to manage, you create a tree. At the top is the root, below that the extensions, and under each extension the names. Each branch is responsible for its own piece. Compare it to a postal address: the country knows which city, the city knows which street, the street knows which house. Nobody needs to know all the addresses in the world, and yet the mail arrives. We still use that system today, with billions of lookups per day. SIDN alone, the manager of .nl, answers around four billion of them a day.

A year later, four students in Berkeley wrote the first software that really made the system work, BIND. A later version of it still runs on a large part of all nameservers in the world today.

January 1, 1985: the first extensions

So which extension came first? That's a tie. On January 1, 1985, the first seven extensions went live at the same time: .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil and .arpa. The names had been laid down a year earlier in RFC 920 and were devised by Jake Feinler's team: .com for companies (commercial), .org for organizations, .edu for universities, .gov for the American government, .mil for the military. It was 1985, and the internet was still so American that nobody thought it strange that "the government" simply meant the American government.

Only in November 1988 was an eighth added, .int, at the request of NATO. After that, nothing happened for twelve years.

March 15, 1985: symbolics.com, the very first

And then the question everyone wants answered: which domain name was the very first? That's symbolics.com, registered on March 15, 1985 by Symbolics, a company from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Symbolics built so-called Lisp machines, computers for researchers in artificial intelligence. Such a machine was about the size of a refrigerator. A nice detail: their computers created the animations for a few Star Trek films, and the company is mentioned in the novel Jurassic Park.

How special that was becomes clear from the pace afterward. In all of 1985, exactly six .com domain names were registered: after Symbolics came bbn.com (April 24), think.com (May 24), mcc.com (July 11), dec.com (September 30) and northrop.com (November 7). In 1986 came the big names: xerox.com, hp.com, ibm.com, sun.com, intel.com and att.com. Apple registered apple.com on February 19, 1987, Microsoft only joined on May 2, 1991, amazon.com arrived on November 1, 1994 and google.com on September 15, 1997. Funnily enough, facebook.com already existed from March 29, 1997, eight years before Facebook bought it. In 1992, seven years after the start, there were still fewer than 15,000 .com domain names. Now there are more than 166 million.

Symbolics itself has long ceased to exist, but the domain name hasn't. In August 2009, symbolics.com was sold to a domain name investor, and it's still online today as a small monument.

For the sake of completeness: the Scandinavians claim with nordu.net to hold the oldest domain name in the world, because it already existed on January 1, 1985. However, that was the day the extensions themselves were created; nordu.net was the name of a network node, not a regular registration. Symbolics.com is the first domain name that a company actually applied for and received.

The other extensions also had their firsts. On April 24, 1985, five universities received a .edu name at the same time (berkeley.edu, cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu and ucla.edu), in June 1985 css.gov was the first government name, and on July 10, 1985, Mitre registered the first .org: mitre.org.

A beer coaster in Amsterdam: how countries got their own extension

All those extensions were American. At the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, Teus Hagen and Piet Beertema found that a bit strange. Hagen told the NOS in 2026 how it went: they thought .edu, .gov and .com were too American, and sketched the extensions .nl and .be on a beer coaster, based on the country codes on car license plates. Because Germany uses only one letter on its license plates (the D) and that was too few, they opted for two letters. "On every truck I see my signature," Hagen still says proudly.

The official basis became the existing ISO list of two-letter country codes. Jon Postel handed out the country extensions according to a simple rule: whoever was the first to seriously ask for their country's extension and was willing to take responsibility for it, got it. In this way the entire world was divided up within a few years, without a treaty, without a meeting, by email.

On paper, .us was the first country extension, created on February 15, 1985. Then came .uk and .gb on July 24, 1985 (the British already used "uk" on their own network and didn't want to switch to the official code gb, which was therefore never put into use), .il for Israel on October 24, 1985 and .au for Australia on March 5, 1986. But those first extensions were limited or not yet actually in use. The first country extension outside the United States to actually start running was .nl.

April 25, 1986: the Netherlands gets .nl

Piet Beertema, system administrator at CWI, wrote a formal request to Jon Postel in the spring of 1986. He expected a long procedure. Two weeks later a reply came back that amounted to: approved, go ahead. Beertema said he was "truly dumbfounded." Postel added that he was the first to register a national extension. On April 25, 1986, .nl was a fact.

On May 1, 1986, Beertema registered the first .nl domain name, and you guessed it: cwi.nl, for his own employer. That name still exists today. Anyone looking at SIDN's whois will actually see April 30, Koninginnedag (Queen's Day), listed. That's because SIDN switched to UTC world time in 2012, which shifted all old registration dates by one day. Beertema maintains it was May 1, and he was there.

The second .nl name was hse.nl from the Hogeschool Eindhoven, on May 17, 1986. The first ten were all universities, colleges and research institutes. The first major company was Philips, with philips.nl on September 24, 1986. That wasn't without a hitch: multiple people applied for the name Philips, and Beertema had to decide on his own who would get it. Between 1986 and 1991, fewer than a hundred .nl domain names were registered in total.

How did that registration work? A request came in by email, Beertema read it, and entered the name by hand into a text file on his computer. With a sense of irony, he himself called this "cutting-edge technology." He did this alone for ten years, around ten thousand domain names in total. He also created a do-it-yourself package with which colleagues in other European countries could set up their own extension. Within a few years, almost all of Europe had one. On November 17, 1988, at 2:28 PM, he also connected the Netherlands as one of the first two countries to NSFNET, the predecessor of the internet as we know it. It's not for nothing that he's called the Godfather of .nl. He still manages the website godfatherof.nl.

By 1996, it had really become too much for Beertema alone ("it's gotten a bit out of hand," he said himself). On January 31, 1996, CWI, SURFnet and NLnet therefore founded SIDN, the Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland, which has handled all .nl registrations ever since. From April 1, 1996, a .nl domain name cost money for the first time. And it wasn't until 2003 that individuals were also allowed to register a .nl domain name; before that you had to be registered with the Chamber of Commerce.

1991: the web makes the domain name famous

Until the early nineties, domain names were something for researchers and system administrators. That changed when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN and released it in 1991. Suddenly everyone had a reason to remember an address, and a domain name became a brand name. In 1995, the American government decided that registration was no longer free: Network Solutions was allowed to charge 100 dollars for two years. In 1998, ICANN was established to manage the entire system, and in 2000 Verisign bought the company Network Solutions for 21 billion dollars. A company that had changed hands for 4.7 million dollars back in 1995.

Things also moved fast in the Netherlands. The millionth .nl domain name was registered on December 19, 2003 (verzeker-online-zelf.nl), the two millionth on August 10, 2006 (shop4business.nl), the five millionth in 2012 and the six millionth on June 18, 2020 (deyogiclub.nl). There are now more than six million .nl domain names, making the Netherlands the fourth country extension in the world. Of all Dutch websites, about seventy percent use a .nl name. The most expensive .nl domain name ever was vakantie.nl, sold for 2.5 million euros in 2007.

The domain name as a gold mine

Where names are scarce, trading happens. The most expensive domain name whose price is known is ai.com: sold in 2025 for 70 million dollars. Before that, voice.com topped the list, bought in 2019 for 30 million dollars. Other top sales: 360.com (17 million, 2015), chat.com (15.5 million, 2023), sex.com (13 million, 2010) and hotels.com (11 million, back in 2001 already). By comparison: a new .nl domain name costs a few euros a year at WebOké. You just need to be earlier than everyone else.

New extensions: from .info to .amsterdam

For fifteen years, it stayed with the original extensions and country codes. In November 2000, ICANN selected the first new ones: .info, .biz, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop and .museum. In 2004, .mobi, .travel, .jobs and .cat (for Catalonia, not for cats) followed, among others. On May 5, 2010, the first extensions in a different script went live, in Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, followed just over a week later by the Russian .рф.

The big breakthrough came in 2012, when ICANN opened up the system to anyone with a good plan and a solid budget. 1,930 applications came in. The first new extensions were signed in July 2013, and in February 2014 .guru went live as the first Latin-script newcomer. The Netherlands joined in: .frl for Friesland has existed since August 22, 2014 and .amsterdam since November 20, 2014. There are now more than 1,200 generic extensions, from .app to .zuerich.

The internet in numbers

In mid-2026, the world counted more than 400 million domain names for the first time: 401.6 million to be exact. Of these, 166.6 million are .com and 148.6 million are country extensions. The largest country extension is .de with over 17 million names; .nl ranks fourth with over six million. Not bad for a beer coaster.

And what about weboke.nl?

Of course we looked it up. Weboke.nl was registered on April 22, 2005. That's exactly three days before the nineteenth anniversary of .nl, and six days before .eu existed: that extension wasn't created until April 28, 2005. So weboke.nl is older than the European extension, older than Twitter and older than the iPhone. At the time of our registration, there were about one and a half million .nl domain names; the two millionth wouldn't arrive until more than a year later. Next to cwi.nl we're a youngster, but in domain name years we're now a respectable twenty-something.

The history in brief

• 1974: one text file, HOSTS.TXT, contains all the computer names on ARPANET.
• November 1983: Paul Mockapetris describes the Domain Name System.
• January 1, 1985: .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil and .arpa go live.
• February 15, 1985: .us becomes the first country extension, on paper.
• March 15, 1985: symbolics.com, the very first domain name.
• April 25, 1986: the Netherlands gets .nl, the first working country extension outside the US.
• May 1, 1986: cwi.nl, the first .nl domain name.
• 1991: the World Wide Web makes domain names interesting for everyone.
• 1995: registration costs money for the first time, 100 dollars for two years.
• January 31, 1996: SIDN takes over .nl from Piet Beertema.
• 1998: ICANN is established.
• December 19, 2003: the millionth .nl domain name.
• April 22, 2005: weboke.nl.
• April 28, 2005: .eu.
• May 5, 2010: the first extensions in a non-Latin script.
• 2014: hundreds of new extensions, including .frl and .amsterdam.
• 2026: more than 400 million domain names worldwide, .nl turns 40.

All country extensions with their birth date

Below are all 248 country extensions that exist today, from oldest to newest, with the date on which IANA (the organization that manages the root of the internet) created the extension. That is the moment from which domain names could first be registered under that extension; the first actual name usually followed within days to months. Looking for a particular country? Use your browser's search function (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F).

Sources

• SIDN: 40 years of the .nl domain and SIDN's milestones
• NOS: Fortieth anniversary of .nl
• IANA Root Zone Database (creation dates of all extensions, retrieved in October 2026)
• Wikipedia: oldest domain names, Domain Name System and .nl
• Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, second quarter 2026