Adobe.com Was the 42nd .com Domain Ever Registered

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I get a lot of random comments on this site and sometimes it’s a little difficult to tell what’s a spam comment and what isn’t. But I got a comment today from what appears to be just a spammy link site (WreckRamblin) that turned out to be pretty cool. It seems that adobe.com was the 42nd .com domain ever registered beating out companies like apple.com and even microsoft.com.

I knew Adobe had a long history on the web but it’s pretty cool to think about it being one of the very first companies to have a web presence. Even the Wayback Machine only goes back to October 22nd, 1996. I think Adobe.com has an even bigger role to play in the years ahead.

[tags]Adobe, Domains[/tags]

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  • http://www.jmihai.ro/blog/ J. Mihai

    Well that is something new for me :)

    For sure it was a great achievement at that time have a domain name, come to think about it, few years ago it was damn expensive to get a simple web host. And simple web host means you can only upload html files and that’s all. Not to even think about php or mySql.

    BTW Ryan, wouldn’t be interesting to find out if the first Adobe site was made with simple .html pages or using an aplication ?

  • Patrick

    42nd?

    ah come on!
    even just a small hint to the answer to life, the universe and everything would be more than appropriate ;)

    http://www.google.fr/search?q=answer+to+life+the+universe+and+everything

  • http://blogs.eyepartner.com/adrian/ Adrian Aioanei

    One of the reasons why Adobe is one of the giants in the IT business :) .
    @Mihai: be sure they had an internal application much like Coldfusion when they opened the site ha :)

    Adrian.

  • http://www.wreckramblin.com Wreck

    Thanks Ryan i’m glad you like the piece of trivia. Well spotted about Microsoft too, i didn’t realize it wasn’t in the first 100 domains but yes Adobe.com is certainly way older by almost 5 years.

    When i was stumbling around reading some info on these oldest domains i came across your entry about Adobe’s 25 birthday as a company and thought i would mention about the domain name. I wasn’t aware of Adobe’s early history, and i’m sure a lot of others aren’t either.

    It really shows Adobe had a strong vision for the future and the internet way back then, and has certainly come a long way.

    BTW the link back to your 25th Birthday entry is broken for some reason, it links back to this page instead of p=1175

  • http://flashtechs.blogspot.com J.Mihai

    @Adrian, nice to see someone from RO around here :)

    Would you happen to know more details related to what Adobe used to use for their website ? Something like a blogpost or an history page related to that ? It would really be interesting to see their old site. The webarchive does not gives me the details I need.

    Kind regard,
    J.Mihai

  • http://blogs.eyepartner.com/adrian/ Adrian Aioanei

    To see how the site used to look you can track it down back to 1996 here http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://adobe.com. As for what they used would be a mystery unless someone from them tells us :) .
    On the first site from the archive in 1996 they have this Adobe PageMill product http://web.archive.org/web/19961027102844/www1.adobe.com/prodindex/pagemill/main.html. Maybe they used this one but i doubt.

    Adrian.

  • http://www.kendallwhitehouse.com/ Kendall Whitehouse

    Ryan:

    It would be interesting to know more about what Adobe did with the adobe.com domain name back in the early days. My guess is that they had an FTP server at some point.

    As I recall, their public web site — http://www.adobe.com/ — didn’t go live until sometime around Q2 or Q3 of 1994.

    I’m sure there are a few Adobe old-timers in San Jose that remember those days.

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    I got some word back from Chris Cox of the Photoshop team… he suspects the domain was registered for email and FTP, back in the days even before the Usenet discussion groups started taking off. Makes sense.

    The Macromedia.com website was opened on the day of the Shockwave and Netscape 2.0 announcements, June 5 1995. My memory is that Adobe added a public website a few months after Macromedia did.
    http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease28.html

    Early macromedia.com was created in BBEdit. Dreamweaver arrived (in public beta, pre-Labs!) towards October 1997… its big thing was reconciling the new Microsoft JavaScript API with the existing Netscape JavaScript API for whizzy Ajax-y “DHTML”. I think Adobe had bought Pagemill from Seneca Software (sp?) by the time adobe.com had opened, but that whole period was many many coffeecups ago…. ;-)

    Considering Adobe’s strength in research and its academic connections, I think the early registration may indeed have been for email and FTP, before the name “The Web” was coined in 1989.

    The takeway from this may be that the Net is bigger than the Web… there’s a lot of network applications which don’t fit into the WWW model of hyperlinked text and browsers.

    jd/adobe

  • http://www.wreckramblin.com Wreck

    Excellent, thanks for the info John.

    I find the early days of the .com really interesting, and since i first made mention to Ryan about Adobe being the 42nd domain registered i have been hunting for some more info beyond archive.org

    I haven’t come up with a lot as it seems there isn’t much documentation carried over to the web from pre public site days.

    Is the guy who originally registered the domain still within Adobe do you know? I wonder what he thinks about his humble Email/FTP domain registration becoming one of the most powerful domains on the globe.

  • http://www.nhse.org James Burt

    Cool! Adobe.com was registered on 17.11.1986 according to Whois and is currently 21 years 2 months and 6 days old to be exact. Too bad the Wayback machine could not be able to show what Adobe.com was during its infant stage.