They were created in the mid-1980s. Here are some of the oldest still working websites in the world. And some of them have found a way to capitalize on their great age. Watch out for the old-age bug.
Consulting a website has become harmless. Several times a day, most French people surf the web. Many Internet users are even today capable of creating a site themselves, no need to be a computer professional.
So finding sites dating back to the mid-1980s is quite a feat. Thirty years is not much on the scale of human history. But in the history of the Internet, it represents an eternity! Here’s a small overview of the oldest websites and domain names ever registered on the Net.
An online internet museum
The one that claims to be the oldest site in the world is symbolics.com. Registered in March 1985, this domain name is probably one of the first in the world.
From the front page, the tone is set. A sign with timetables on the right. A sign “Internet Museum in close-up”: “By the way, we don’t have a building. The museum can only be visited online,” ironically says the homepage.
Welcome to the living memory of the web. On this site you will find all the key dates of the digital age. From the arrival of e-mail to the creation of Facebook and the first hackers. You will learn that the concept of the web was conceived as early as 1934 by the Belgian Paul Otlet.
Maintaining a presence on the Internet even without content
A little more recent, itcorp.com. The latter, created in September 1986, is owned by the California-based Interrupt Technology Corporation. When the home page opens, the site is clean, to say the least. There’s nothing there, strictly speaking. Barely a few lines of text. And two questions.
“We’re a small private software consulting firm specializing in storage systems and computer metrics,” say the site’s designers. They even offer their services via an e-mail address. Not sure that such an outdated site is the best advertisement in the world. Still, the designers say they want to “satisfy the needs of those who expect every domain to have a presence on the web. In other words, to maintain a presence on the Internet even without content. An almost militant act
Blogs, the first fruits of internet freedom of expression
Still in 1986, but in October this time, it is the domain name vortex.com which is registered. It was created by Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, Network Neutrality Squad and founder of the PRIVACY Forum. It is the equivalent of the oldest online blog.
Today, the American continues to post on the 34-year-old blog. In particular, she talks about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the digital world. Or lighter subjects like her personal life.
Originally, the site’s aim was to make Internet users aware of the dangers of the Internet. “This site is a collection of information to help visitors become better citizens of the Internet,” the creator explained in one of her first posts.
Websites with crazy sales prices
Some of these web ancestors are also very lucrative. For example, the purple.com site, which for a long time only offered a simple purple home page, frequently asked questions and an option to purchase the site for $1.5 million. A few years ago, an interested American company acquired the domain name. The site now serves as an online sales platform for mattresses. However, it is impossible to know whether the company really paid such a large sum of money to become the owner of purple.com.
But milk.com goes even further. While the site does not offer to buy milk online at all, it does sell its page for about $10 million. These elements lead us to believe that a juicy domain name business did indeed exist in the early years of the Internet.
