When Domains Were Free: The Early Days of .com, 1985 to 1999
For ten years, registering a .com cost nothing. Here is how a few hundred technical addresses became the most valuable real estate online.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
On March 15, 1985, Symbolics, a computer company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, registered symbolics.com. It was the first .com domain. By the end of the year there were six. It took until November 1987 to reach one hundred, and most of the names on that list belong to computer makers, defense contractors and research labs: bbn.com, think.com, dec.com, ibm.com, sun.com, intel.com.
Nobody bought these names. There was nothing to buy. If your organization was connected to the research networks, you asked for a name and you got one, free.
Before domains, there was a text file
On the original ARPANET, every computer had a name, and a single file called HOSTS.TXT listed every name next to its numeric address. The Network Information Center at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, kept that file and sent out updates. Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, who led the NIC from 1972, ran what was essentially the internet's phone book, plus its help desk, reached by phone and by mail.
That worked when the network had a few hundred machines. It didn't work as it grew into thousands. In 1983 Paul Mockapetris designed the Domain Name System, which split the job up: instead of one giant list, names were organized into a tree, with top-level domains like .com, .edu and .org at the top and each organization looking after its own branch. The first of those top-level domains went into service in 1985, and the Defense Data Network's NIC at SRI handled registrations.
The handoff to Network Solutions
In 1991 the Defense Information Systems Agency moved the job from SRI to a contractor, which subcontracted it to a small Virginia company called Network Solutions. On October 1, 1991, the registry moved off a DECSYSTEM-20 at SRI and onto a Sun server in Chantilly, Virginia. Network Solutions kept giving out .com, .net and .org names for free.
By 1993 most of the internet's growth was civilian, so the National Science Foundation took over funding and created the InterNIC. Network Solutions won the registration part of the contract, which made it the only place in the world to register a .com, .net or .org. It was the sole bidder.
Then the web happened
The early .coms were technical addresses. Then Mosaic arrived in 1993, Netscape in 1994, and suddenly a domain name was something you put on a business card, a billboard or a TV commercial. Registrations exploded, and a registry that had been run as a small government-funded service was buried in paperwork.
After Science Applications International Corporation bought Network Solutions in 1995, the NSF allowed it to start charging. The price was $100 for two years. Thirty percent of that went to the NSF for an "Internet Intellectual Infrastructure Fund," a cut that a court later ruled was an illegal tax. The fee dropped to $70.
The change in price changed how people thought about names. Short, generic words were obviously going to be worth something, and the people who noticed early registered them. Generic names like business.com and sex.com were snapped up early. In early 1994, entrepreneur Gary Kremen registered sex.com for nothing. In October 1995, Network Solutions transferred it to a man named Stephen Cohen after he sent in a forged letter, and it took Kremen five years in court to get it back. That case did more than any other to show that a domain name was property worth stealing.
The monopoly ends
Network Solutions' fees, and the fact that it was the only seller, pushed the U.S. government to change the system. In 1998 the Department of Commerce backed a new non-profit, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN took over coordinating the domain system, and Network Solutions had to split its business in two: a registry that kept the master list of .com names, and a registrar that sold them, competing with new registrars that, by the end of 1999, could buy .com names wholesale and resell them.
Jon Postel, the UCLA computer scientist who had run the internet's numbering authority since the early days and was sometimes called the "god of the Internet," died in October 1998, just as the system he'd helped run was handed to ICANN. He had brushed off the nickname. The internet worked, he said, because a lot of people cooperated.
The first hundred, today
Many of the first hundred .com names are still registered, and our list of them checks every registration date against the live .com registry. Some are still owned by the companies that registered them in 1985 and 1986. Others changed hands as companies merged, failed or sold their names on. Number 68, datacube.com, was registered on April 23, 1987, by Datacube Inc., a Massachusetts company that built image-processing hardware.
A name that cost nothing in 1987 cost $100 in 1995. The people who understood that difference first are the reason the word "domainer" exists.