On the second try
In fact, RuNet appeared on December 4, 1993. On that day, representatives of the six largest Internet providers of that time (Demos Plus, GlasNet, Techno, SovAm Teleport, EUnet/Relcom, X-Atom) and representatives of the academic network FREEnet, created at the initiative of the Organic Institute, gathered. Chemistry ND Zelinsky RAS signed an agreement to approve a single administrator of the .ru domain zone. It became the independent non-profit organization RosNIIROS (Research Institute for the Development of Public Networks of Russia).
Then the signed agreement and the application for the allocation of the .ru top-level domain on the global Internet were sent to the USA, to the headquarters of IANA, an international organization responsible for registering top-level domain names for different countries. This is how RuNet was born.
It is noteworthy that Russia was not successful in obtaining the .ru domain name for the first time. In 1992, providers Relcom, Demos and FREEnet simultaneously applied for the allocation of the .ru zone to IANA. However, they were not accepted because it was not clear which of the applicants would be the manager in the current situation.
Administrator is the person who registers website domains (addresses in text format such as socialbites.ca) and assigns to them the IP addresses of computers and servers on which data of registered web resources are stored, as well as the full names of their owners. (text, images, code, etc.)).
As the former head of RosNIIROS, Alexey Platonov, who participated in the signing of the agreement on December 4, 1993, explained to socialbites.ca, at that moment every provider wanted to become a manager, because this role was completely advantageous. new and growing RuNet market:
“Naturally, neither provider wanted any advantage to be taken away from the other. The management of a top-level domain name can be used to your advantage in different ways: as an image tool, for example, to expand the customer base, and more.”
As a result, RosNIIROS was chosen as the administrator, as providers could not in principle take on this role. By the 90s, according to Platonov, a certain world practice had developed in which the coordinator of the top-level domain zone was, as a rule, either an already existing neutral organization or a new organization specifically created as a manager. a top-level domain or a scientific and educational network.
“RosNIIROS was chosen as a neutral, non-profit and non-governmental organization with the necessary experience – we previously managed the .su zone transferred to us by Relcom,” said the head of the organization.
In 2001, the role of domain administrator in the .ru zone was transferred to the National Internet Domain Coordination Center (CC). .ru took over the task of registering the domain name, and RosNIIROS took care of the technical maintenance of the system and its infrastructure.
It all started in a school notebook
CC director Andrey Vorobyov said that initially there were so few domains in RuNet that their electronic records were copied into a regular school notebook. Photos of the second “volume” of the paper record were published for the first time by socialbites.ca. As Vorobiev explains, the first notebook has not survived.
in a separate report
View photos
“Of course, the electronic registration of the .ru domain zone already existed in 1998; Without it the system would simply not work. It was stored as a text file on the computer and contained data about all domain names. The director of the center said that the notebook initially stored duplicate information about the .su and .ru domains and their administrators in case there were problems with the electronic file.
Today, of course, no notebook will be enough to rewrite all domain names: as of September 2023, there are more than 5 million domains in the .ru zone alone, and they are managed by approximately two million administrators.
Alina Dzhus/socialbites.ca
The first site on RuNet was www.ru. It was an evaluation tool, a kind of ancestor of Yandex, with a search bar of Russian sites registered on the network at that time.
Later, Vorobiev recalls, more specific sites began to appear. In his opinion, the pioneers include the websites of the information agency RosBusinessConsulting (RBC). rbc.ru (1995), “Teacher newspaper” Ug.ru (1995), Rambler company rambler.ru (1996), car catalog auto.ru (1997), entertainment portal Anekdot.ru (1997) and more.
“The first users of the Internet in general and RuNet in particular were employees of scientific institutes, “technical programmers” and Internet enthusiasts who developed projects in the nascent online space. Therefore, domains for university websites, online catalogs and search engines, as well as media and IT companies, were among the first to be registered in the .ru zone,” Vorobiev explained.
According to him, online publishing also left a visible mark in the history of Runet. socialbites.ca. This domain name was registered by Anton Nosik, journalist and one of the first Russian Internet bloggers, on April 21, 1998, four years after the launch of the .ru domain zone. The site started its operations on February 28, 1999. socialbites.ca is often referred to online as “the first Russian daily online newspaper without a paper counterpart.”
Fun time
socialbites.ca’s interlocutors recalled that at the dawn of RuNet, funny situations often occurred in the work of domain registrars due to the novelty of the Internet as a technology and the naivety of the first users of the network.
“One day, a prominent businessman came to us and said that he wanted to register the domain name sex.ru. And we had a rule then – to get this or that “general purpose” field, the applicant must have some kind of justification, and not just a desire. We (Field Coordination Group – socialbites.ca) told him: “Sex is clearly a widely used concept. We can’t just give you this domain name.”
The businessman approached the problem seriously: he acquired the company Sex LLC and registered it. I already came with documents. This time we had no objections, he bought sex.ru without asking any questions,” said Platonov.
Judging by the records in the Wayback Machine service database, the site sex.ru, oddly enough, was not the first source of Russian porn. The creators of the portal positioned their project as a “host of popular science, education and entertainment.” He published news and articles about sex.
In turn, CC’s Vorobiev recalled that one of the first “domain investors” in Russia was the now popular blogger and web designer Artemy Lebedev. Their first assets were specifically domain names apteka.ru, metro.ru, vodka.ru And magazine.ru. Each one will probably cost $100. In any case, according to the expert, this is exactly what the average price of a domain name was in the late 90s.
Source: Gazeta
Jackson Ruhl is a tech and sci-fi expert, who writes for “Social Bites”. He brings his readers the latest news and developments from the world of technology and science fiction.