The history of domain names: from HOSTS.TXT to 1,400+ extensions

Domain names date back to 1983, when Paul Mockapetris designed the Domain Name System (DNS) to replace HOSTS.TXT, a single file that listed every computer on the early internet. The first top-level domains, including .com, .org and .net, were created on 1 January 1985, and the first .com, symbolics.com, was registered on 15 March 1985. By the end of September 2026 there were 411.6 million registered domain names.

This article covers how domain names began, how registering them turned into a market, how the list of extensions grew and where the Dutch .nl fits in. Looking for the history of one specific domain, such as how old it is or what used to be on it? Skip to how to look up the history of a domain.

What is a domain name?

A domain name is the human-readable address of your website and email, such as yourcompany.com. Computers find each other by IP address, such as 192.0.2.10, and DNS translates the name into that address, for example with an A record. You read a domain name from right to left:

• .com is the extension, or top-level domain (TLD).
• yourcompany is the name you register.
• www or shop in front of it is a subdomain, which you can create yourself.

At the far right there is an invisible dot: the root, the top of DNS. The root defines which extensions exist and which name servers are responsible for each one.

Domain name history timeline

Before domain names: one file listing every computer

In the early 1980s, every computer on the ARPA Internet, the forerunner of today's internet, was listed by name and address in one file: HOSTS.TXT, maintained by the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI in California. To turn a name into an address, computers used a copy of that file.

Every new computer made the list longer and the updates more frequent. In November 1983, Paul Mockapetris wrote that the size of the table, and especially the frequency of updates, were near the limit of manageability. His proposal: a distributed database instead of one central file.

Who invented DNS, and how does it work?

Mockapetris worked at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California. In RFC 882 and RFC 883, published in November 1983, he described the Domain Name System. Names are arranged in a tree, and each branch of the tree has its own administrator with its own name servers. A lookup walks down that tree:

1. The root knows which name servers are responsible for each extension.
2. The name servers of an extension, such as Verisign's for .com, know which name servers are responsible for each domain. This is what the NS record is for.
3. The domain's own name servers give the final answer: the IP address of the website, the mail servers and the other records.

No one has to maintain the full list any more, and every administrator manages their own names. In November 1987, RFC 1034 and RFC 1035 replaced the first version, and with many additions they are still the foundation of DNS. How a change then spreads across the internet is explained in what is DNS propagation.

1985: the first top-level domains and the first .com

RFC 920, from October 1984, described the first top-level domains. According to IANA's root zone database, these generic extensions have existed since 1 January 1985:

On 15 March 1985, the American computer company Symbolics registered symbolics.com, the oldest .com still on record with that date. The .net registry lists nordu.net, of the Nordic research network NORDUnet, with a registration date of 1 January 1985.

The first country-code extensions also arrived in 1985, using two-letter codes from the ISO list: .us in February, .uk in July and .il (Israel) in October. .uk is an exception, because the ISO code for the United Kingdom is GB.

The history of .nl, the Dutch domain

Piet Beertema, system administrator at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, asked internet pioneer Jon Postel for a country extension for the Netherlands. Postel approved it, .nl entered the root on 25 April 1986, and on 1 May 1986 CWI registered the first .nl domain: cwi.nl. According to SIDN, this made .nl the first actively used country-code domain outside the United States.

Beertema handled every registration himself for ten years. On 31 January 1996, the newly founded Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland (SIDN) took over. Since 2003 anyone can register a .nl, including private individuals and people outside the Netherlands, and .nl passed one million names that same year. In April 2026, .nl turned 40 with more than 6 million names.

From free to paid: registrars, ICANN and disputes

In the early years, domain names were free. From 1993, Network Solutions ran registration for .com, .org, .net and others as part of InterNIC, under an agreement with the US National Science Foundation. With the rise of the web, demand grew fast, and from 14 September 1995 a new registration cost 100 dollars for the first two years and 50 dollars a year after that.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was founded in 1998 as a non-profit to coordinate the internet's names and numbers. In 1999, competing registrars gained access to .com, .net and .org through a shared registration system. That created the division of roles that still applies:

As domain names became valuable, disputes followed: who gets to use a brand name as a domain? At the end of 1999, ICANN introduced the UDRP, a standard procedure for disputes over generic extensions. The first case, about worldwrestlingfederation.com, was decided in January 2000. Country-code registries set their own rules; for .nl, SIDN has its own dispute procedure, run by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

More and more extensions: from .info to .amsterdam

For a long time there were only a handful of generic extensions next to the country codes. On 16 November 2000, ICANN selected seven new ones: .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro.

The big expansion came in 2012. ICANN received 1,930 applications, from brand names to words such as .shop and .online. The first new extensions entered the root in October 2013, and the round added more than 1,200 extensions in total, including city and regional ones such as .amsterdam and .frl (Friesland) in 2014. .eu has been open to everyone in the EU since 7 April 2006.

In 2026, ICANN opened a new round. Applications could be filed from 30 April to 12 August 2026, and on 7 October 2026 ICANN revealed 1,615 of them, 333 for brands. On 17 November 2026 ICANN publishes the final list of strings, followed by a period for public input and objections that runs until 16 March 2027. When the first new extensions from this round can be registered has not been announced yet.

Internationalized domain names (IDN)

DNS originally worked only with the letters a to z, digits and the hyphen. For languages with accents or other scripts, the IDNA standard (RFC 3490) arrived in March 2003 and was revised in 2010. A name with special characters is converted into characters DNS understands, starting with xn--. That makes bücher.de in DNS actually xn--bcher-kva.de; your browser handles the conversion for you.

On 5 May 2010, the first country codes in non-Latin scripts entered the root, for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Today 151 of the 1,436 extensions in IANA's list are internationalized names. .nl does not support them: a .nl name contains only the letters a to z, digits and hyphens.

More secure and more open: DNSSEC and RDAP

DNS was not designed in the 1980s to detect forged answers. DNSSEC adds digital signatures, so a resolver can check that an answer is genuine. The root zone was first served signed with real keys on 15 July 2010. How it works is explained in what is DNSSEC.

Looking up who holds a domain changed too. For decades that meant WHOIS. Since 28 January 2025, RDAP has been the official source of registration data for generic extensions such as .com. Country codes set their own policy: SIDN offers both WHOIS and RDAP for .nl and keeps the personal data of private registrants out of the public WHOIS. What is public about your own domain is covered in manage WHOIS data for your domain name.

Domain names by the numbers

How to look up the history of a domain

Domain history can also mean the history of one domain name: how old it is and what used to be on it. Here is how to find out:

1. Check the creation date. For .com and other generic extensions, use ICANN Lookup; for a .nl, use SIDN's whois. For symbolics.com, for example, the Creation Date is 1985-03-15.
2. Know what that date means. The creation date marks the start of the current registration. If a domain ever expired and was registered again, you only see the new date. Transferring a domain to another registrar does not change it.
3. See what the website used to look like. Enter the domain in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. A calendar shows the days on which a copy of the site was saved, and you can open those copies.
4. Check where the domain points now. The tools in troubleshoot DNS problems show the current name servers and records. DNS itself does not keep earlier settings.

Planning to register a domain that someone else owned before? Check the Wayback Machine first. A name that was used for spam or misleading sites can still suffer from that history in search engines and spam filters for some time.

Your domain name with LJPc hosting

Your own piece of domain history starts with a registration. In the customer portal you search for a name and immediately see which extensions are available and what they cost, from .nl, .com, .eu, .be and .de to newer ones such as .amsterdam, .frl, .shop and .online. This is what we take care of:

• Registration with the registry. We register the name in your name, with the registrant details you choose in the portal.
• DNS and DNSSEC. Your domain gets our name servers ns1, ns2 and ns3.ljpc.network straight away, and we enable DNSSEC automatically.
• Linking to your hosting. Order the domain together with a hosting package and we link it to your website and email right away.

The steps are in how to register a domain and link it to your hosting. Already have a domain elsewhere? Transfer your domain to LJPc; its creation date stays the same. For the bigger picture, read what is web hosting.