The Oldest Domains on the Internet — Registrations by Year Since 1985 | DNS.pizza
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The oldest domains on the internet
The DNS opened for business in 1985 — nordu.net was created on January 1, and symbolics.com became the first registered .com on March 15. Below: the earliest-registered domains among the 85,879 domains dns.pizza has analyzed with verified registration dates, and how registration grew from a handful of research labs to the modern web.<br>Dates as reported by each registry via WHOIS/RDAP · snapshot July 17, 2026 · check any domain's age<br>nordu.net<br>oldest analyzed domain (January 1, 1985)
85,879<br>domains with verified registration dates
42<br>years of registrations, 1985–2026
implausible registry dates filtered out
Registrations by year<br>When the analyzed web's domains were registered — each bar links to that year's domains.
19852026<br>Square-root scale — early-web years would be invisible on a linear one. Click a bar for that year's domains.
The 25 oldest domains we've analyzed<br>Ranked by registry creation date. Two caveats that matter: when a domain expires and is re-registered, its WHOIS clock restarts — so a famous 1980s name can carry a recent date — and a few registries report dates from before their own records begin. These are the oldest dates currently reported by the registries for our corpus, not a complete history of the internet.<br>#DomainRegisteredTranco rank1nordu.netJanuary 1, 1985#49,9732chalmers.seJanuary 17, 1985#11,6863lth.seJanuary 17, 1985#33,2994lu.seJanuary 17, 1985#5,4805symbolics.comMarch 15, 1985#841,6076nhri.org.twApril 9, 1985#96,2637bbn.comApril 24, 1985#183,1738think.comMay 24, 1985—9taishinbank.com.twMay 27, 1985#48,61510104.com.twJune 26, 1985#4,48711pchome.com.twJuly 3, 1985#4,05512mitre.orgJuly 10, 1985#2,06513kth.seAugust 28, 1985#6,98614dec.comSeptember 30, 1985#77,87015northrop.comNovember 7, 1985#584,64716xerox.comJanuary 9, 1986#99917sri.comJanuary 17, 1986#27,01318hp.comMarch 3, 1986#27219bellcore.comMarch 5, 1986—20ibm.comMarch 19, 1986#28021sun.comMarch 19, 1986#1,32422intel.comMarch 25, 1986#43323ti.comMarch 25, 1986#2,94124att.comApril 25, 1986#1,16225cwi.nlApril 30, 1986#4,133
Four decades of domains<br>The ARPANET pioneers<br>1985–1990 · 301 analyzed domains<br>DNS is brand new. Registration is free, manual, and almost entirely computer companies, defense contractors and universities — the first .com (symbolics.com) arrives March 15, 1985.<br>Biggest namesapple.com, adobe.com, oracle.com, bbc.com, cisco.com, hp.com<br>198519861987198819891990
The web arrives<br>1991–1995 · 4,101 analyzed domains<br>The World Wide Web goes public and domains stop being just mail routing. By 1995 the NSF allows commercial registration fees — $100 for two years — and land-grab instincts wake up.<br>Biggest namesgtld-servers.net, microsoft.com, live.com, amazon.com, azure.com, office.net<br>19911992199319941995
The dot-com boom<br>1996–2000 · 14,756 analyzed domains<br>Registration counts explode as every business rushes online. Most of today's household-name domains that weren't 80s tech companies date from these five years.<br>Biggest namesgoogle.com, facebook.com, mail.ru, akamai.net, twitter.com, office.com<br>19961997199819992000
After the crash<br>2001–2009 · 19,017 analyzed domains<br>The bubble bursts but registrations keep compounding — Web 2.0, blogs and the social platforms all stake their names here.<br>Biggest namescloudflare.com, gstatic.com, googleapis.com, youtube.com, amazonaws.com, instagram.com<br>200120022003200420052006200720082009
The mobile decade<br>2010–2019 · 26,312 analyzed domains<br>Hundreds of new gTLDs launch (2013 onward), startups brand on .io and .co, and the .com aftermarket turns aged domains into an asset class.<br>Biggest namesezviz7.com, googletagmanager.com, hicloudcam.com, appsflyersdk.com, fastly.net, apple-dns.net<br>2010201120122013201420152016201720182019
The modern web<br>2020–2026 · 21,392 analyzed domains<br>Pandemic-era digitization, then the AI wave — and the era's dark side: phishing campaigns typically burn through domains registered only days earlier, which is exactly why checking a domain's age matters.<br>Biggest nameschatgpt.com, pv-cdn.net, vedcdnlb.com, app-analytics-services.com, prodregistryv2.org, vkuserphoto.ru<br>2020202120222023202420252026
The oldest domain in each TLD<br>Earliest registry dates among analyzed domains, per top-level...