The History of the Domain Name

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

Before the domain name: one list for the entire internet

In the 1970s the internet didn't exist yet. There was the ARPANET, a network of a few dozen computers belonging to universities and the US Department of Defense. Every computer had a number, and because nobody can remember numbers, they also got 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. Want to connect a new computer or change a name? You called the NIC during office hours, and Jake or a colleague added it. After that, every computer on the network had to download the complete file again. As long as there were a few hundred computers, that worked fine. By around 1983 there were so many computers that the file changed almost daily, names clashed with each other and the downloading alone ate up a sizeable chunk 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 a single system.

Mockapetris's idea is actually very simple: instead of one list that everyone has to manage, you build a tree. At the top is the root, below that the extensions, and below each extension the names. Each branch is responsible for its own little part. 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 every address in the world, and yet the mail still arrives. We still use that system today, with billions of lookups a day. SIDN, the registry for .nl, alone answers around four billion of them every day.

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

1 January 1985: the first extensions

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

It wasn't until November 1988 that an eighth one was added, .int, at the request of NATO. After that, things stayed quiet for twelve years.

15 March 1985: symbolics.com, the very first

And now the question everyone wants answered: which domain name was the very first? That's symbolics.com, registered on 15 March 1985 by Symbolics, a company from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Symbolics built so-called Lisp machines, computers for artificial intelligence researchers. One of those machines was roughly the size of a fridge. A nice detail: their computers created the animations for a couple of Star Trek films, and the company gets a mention in the novel Jurassic Park.

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

Symbolics itself is long gone, but the domain name isn't. In August 2009 symbolics.com was sold to a domain name investor, and it is still online to this day as a small monument.

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

The other extensions had their firstborns too. On 24 April 1985 five universities got 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 10 July 1985 Mitre registered the first .org: mitre.org.

A beer mat 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 little odd. In 2026 Hagen told the NOS how it went: they thought .edu, .gov and .com were too American, and sketched the extensions .nl and .be on a beer mat, based on the country codes on car registration plates. Because Germany uses only one letter on its plates (the D) and that was too little, they chose two letters. "I see my signature on every lorry," 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. That's how the whole world was divided up in just a few years, without a treaty, without a meeting, by e-mail.

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

25 April 1986: the Netherlands gets .nl

Piet Beertema, system administrator at CWI, wrote a formal application to Jon Postel in the spring of 1986. He expected a long procedure. Two weeks later there was a reply that boiled down to: approved, go ahead. Beertema says he was "truly flabbergasted". Postel added that he was the first to register a national extension. On 25 April 1986, .nl was a reality.

On 1 May 1986 Beertema registered the first .nl domain name, and you guessed it: cwi.nl, for his own employer. That name still exists. If you look it up in SIDN's whois, by the way, you'll see 30 April, Queen's Day. That's because in 2012 SIDN switched to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which shifted all old registration dates by a day. Beertema maintains it was 1 May, and he was there.

The second .nl name was hse.nl of the Hogeschool Eindhoven, on 17 May 1986. The first ten were all universities, colleges and research institutes. The first big company was Philips, with philips.nl on 24 September 1986. That didn't go without a fight: several people came forward for the name Philips, and Beertema had to decide on his own who got it. Between 1986 and 1991, fewer than a hundred .nl domain names were registered in total.

How did registering work? An application came in by e-mail, Beertema read it, and added the name by hand to a text file on his computer. With a sense of irony, he called it "cutting-edge technology". He did this on his own for ten years, around ten thousand domain names in total. He also put together a do-it-yourself kit that colleagues in other European countries could use to set up their own extension. Within a few years almost all of Europe had one. On top of that, on 17 November 1988 at 14:28 he connected the Netherlands to NSFNET, the forerunner of the internet as we know it, as one of the first two countries. It's no coincidence he's called the Godfather of .nl. He still runs the website godfatherof.nl.

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

1991: the web makes the domain name famous

Until the early 1990s, 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 US government decided that registering would no longer be free: Network Solutions was allowed to charge 100 dollars for two years. In 1998 ICANN was founded to manage the whole system, and in 2000 Verisign bought Network Solutions for 21 billion dollars. A company that had changed hands for 4.7 million dollars back in 1995.

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

The domain name as a goldmine

Where names are scarce, there's trading. The most expensive domain name with a publicly known price is ai.com: sold in 2025 for 70 million dollars. Before that, voice.com held the top spot, 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, as early as 2001). For comparison: at WebOké you can register a new .nl domain name for just a few euros. You just have to be quicker than everyone else.

New extensions: from .info to .amsterdam

For fifteen years it stayed at the original extensions and the country codes. In November 2000 ICANN chose the first new ones: .info, .biz, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop and .museum. In 2004 they were followed by, among others, .mobi, .travel, .jobs and .cat (for Catalonia, not for cats). On 5 May 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 bang came in 2012, when ICANN opened up the system to anyone with a good plan and a hefty wallet. 1,930 applications came in. The first new extensions were signed in July 2013, and in February 2014 .guru launched as the first Latin-script newcomer. The Netherlands joined in: .frl for Friesland has existed since 22 August 2014 and .amsterdam since 20 November 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 precise. Of those, 166.6 million are .com and 148.6 million are country extensions. The largest country extension is .de with more than 17 million names; .nl is in fourth place with more than six million. Not bad for a beer mat.

And what about weboke.nl?

Of course we looked it up. Weboke.nl was registered on 22 April 2005. That's exactly three days before the nineteenth birthday of .nl, and six days before .eu existed: that extension wasn't created until 28 April 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 roughly 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 twentysomething.

The history in brief

• 1974: a single text file, HOSTS.TXT, contains all the computer names of the ARPANET.
• November 1983: Paul Mockapetris describes the Domain Name System.
• 1 January 1985: .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil and .arpa go live.
• 15 February 1985: .us becomes the first country extension, on paper.
• 15 March 1985: symbolics.com, the very first domain name.
• 25 April 1986: the Netherlands gets .nl, the first working country extension outside the US.
• 1 May 1986: cwi.nl, the first .nl domain name.
• 1991: the World Wide Web makes domain names interesting for everyone.
• 1995: registering costs money for the first time, 100 dollars for two years.
• 31 January 1996: SIDN takes over .nl from Piet Beertema.
• 1998: ICANN is founded.
• 19 December 2003: the one millionth .nl domain name.
• 22 April 2005: weboke.nl.
• 28 April 2005: .eu.
• 5 May 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 date of birth

Below are all 248 country extensions that exist today, from oldest to youngest, with the date on which IANA (the organisation that manages the root of the internet) created the extension. That's the moment from which domain names could be registered under that extension for the first time; the first real 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 birthday 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 of 2026

Want to learn more? Take the free course Choosing and managing a domain name, lesson 1.1 What you get when you register a domain name.