Sorry to reply to myself....

But for a few years after we started registering names, requests went to hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa. Around 1987 or so, a big email came out that said you had to go through hostmaster@nic.ddn.mil to get them, and you needed to fill out an email form that was programmatically parsed. I recall from the day that getting domains registers was a hit-or-miss sort of affair, since the parser was super picky. I know a friend missed out on grue.com because his first attempt had some misplaced word and by the time he heard back and redid it, someone else had jumped in line in front of him...

Warner

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 5:22 PM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
nic.ddn.mil post-dated symbolics.com registering by a couple of years. They had a complicated form to fill out to get a domain name after the less formal system became too burdensome to scale.

Warner


On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 4:14 PM, Angus Robinson <angus@fairhaven.za.net> wrote:
According to wikipoedia, .com was setup in January of 1985 and was administered by the US Department of Defense. Although they contracted SRI International, which in turn created DDN-NIC (SRI-NIC), which was found at nic.ddn.mil. 

Assuming they registered it under SRI-NIC. 

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 2:18 PM Pete Wright <pete@nomadlogic.org> wrote:


On 03/14/2018 14:14, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> The first Internet domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985 at
> 0500Z ("Zulu" time, i.e. UTC).
>

This was well before my time, so pardon my ignorance here, but who was
the registrar that they used to register this domain?

thanks!
-pete


--
Pete Wright
pete@nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA