I found this cool list of the oldest domain names on the web. These are sites/domains that have been registered continuously since 1995.These sites are mostly businesses or technology solutions, with the top consumer site being either HP or Adobe. Though you could say none of these sites are really consumer focused.
Most of these sites would get traffic through word of mouth marketing or through their customers. The sites that became really successful, at least at the time, were the companies that knew how to leverage conversational marketing to get their customers to talk about their internet site.
It is pretty interesting to see most of the domains being corporate B2B sites, and if people had any idea of what the internet was going to become this list would have been much more consumer names, such as wine.com and money.com.
The first site real consumer site I heard about, via word of mouth from my dad, was Yahoo. Though I had used AOL and Compuserve before, the first real site I used on a regular basis was Yahoo.
Rank/Create date/Domain name
- 15-Mar-1985 -- SYMBOLICS.COM
- 24-Apr-1985 -- BBN.COM
- 24-May-1985 -- THINK.COM
- 11-Jul-1985 -- MCC.COM
- 30-Sep-1985 -- DEC.COM
- 07-Nov-1985 -- NORTHROP.COM
- 09-Jan-1986 -- XEROX.COM
- 17-Jan-1986 -- SRI.COM
- 03-Mar-1986 -- HP.COM
- 05-Mar-1986 -- BELLCORE.COM
- 19-Mar-1986 -- IBM.COM
- 19-Mar-1986 -- SUN.COM
- 25-Mar-1986 -- INTEL.COM
- 25-Mar-1986 -- TI.COM
- 25-Apr-1986 -- ATT.COM
- 08-May-1986 -- GMR.COM
- 18-May-1986 -- TEK.COM
- 10-Jul-1986 -- FMC.COM
- 11-Jul-1986 -- UB.COM
- 05-Aug-1986 -- BELL-ATL.COM
- 15-Aug-1986 -- GE.COM
- 15-Aug-1986 -- GREBYN.COM
- 05-Aug-1986 -- ISC.COM
- 05-Aug-1986 -- NSC.COM
- 05-Aug-1986 -- STARGATE.COM
- 02-Sep-1986 -- BOEING.COM
- 18-Sep-1986 -- ITCORP.COM
- 29-Sep-1986 -- SIEMENS.COM
- 18-Oct-1986 -- PYRAMID.COM
- 27-Oct-1986 -- ALPHACDC.COM
