Forty years of .nl: how the Dutch internet began

To mark the 40th anniversary of .nl, hosting provider Hostnet BV, with a little help from us, set out to identify the 100 oldest .nl domain names.

Joep Houterman (Chair of the Executive Board at Fontys) became curious after reading the ‘Broncode’ column by Marloes de Koning in NRC... And sure enough... Eindhoven University of Applied Sciences, one of the legal predecessors of Fontys University of Applied Sciences, turned out to be the second organisation, after founding fathers CWI, to apply for a .nl domain. A truly forward-thinking move by our colleagues back then.

Call for information: it is, of course, quite possible that the staff members involved at the time are still working with us today. Or have just retired. There might be a great story in there! Are you, or do you know, the Fontys ICT alumnus or alumna who can tell us more about this? Then Joep and Jo-An would love to get in touch with you!

Update: colleague Martin Ederveen, who is still a lecturer at Fontys ICT, confirmed to us that this was indeed a project he was working on at the time. He suggested to our director at the time that, instead of 16 Class C public network addresses from SURFnet, we should apply for a Class B address, and so we simply applied for two of them. One of which was 145.85.x.x.

You can now read his full story via https://alumni.fhict.nl/nl/nie...

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On 1 May, it will be exactly forty years since the first .nl domain was registered. Whereas nowadays a domain name can be secured within a few minutes, in the 1980s this was still pioneering work. A small group of scientists, researchers and technologists laid the foundations for the Dutch internet as we know it today. Hosting provider Hostnet, together with SIDN, the registry for the .nl domain, looks back on the early years of the Dutch internet and the organisations that were the first to register a domain name at the time.

You can find the story about domain names (and the full top 100) at https://www.hostnet.nl/academy...