I recently posted on Twitter about the 44th anniversary of the first communication across “ARPANET”, which was a  link  in the chain of development that evolved into the internet as we know it today.

When I think ARPANET, my mind jumps to Bob Taylor, instrumental to it’s funding. Bob moved from ARPA onto Xerox, heading up their PARC research center for some time.

Jumping further still, I browsed through the Xerox timeline of  company history , and saw an interesting statistic I hadn’t seen before: xerox.com was the seventh domain registered with the DOD:

Thats quite a claim! So of course, I had to find another source to confirm it.  Wikipedia has a good article on it (source at end of post)

And there it is on wikipedia, Xerox at #7:

Some other notables below. I find the table interesting in that, some sites have  the same rank number, presumably because they registered the same day!

Some of the first were expected; HP was #9; Intel #13.

I also found it humorous that IBM/Sun (now owned by Oracle) registered the same day; they tied for #11.

The oldest registered dot coms, below.

Sources:

http://www.xerox.com/about-xerox/company-history/enus.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names