Memories of .us (computer.rip)

Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts, such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both are still in common use.

[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq...

[2] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZ...

I love the old interent. I'll confess I have three locality domains and they are wonderful.

I'll confess I have successfully registered a locality domain this year (2025) and it was a little bit fun to go through the weird hoops to get this new domain registered.

I'm also working on/helping out a registrar whose owned died and his widow is resolving what to do with the non-profit.

A related quaint couple of blogs[1][2] if you're feeling nostalgic and motivated to register your own:

[1] https://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/

[2] http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html

.su is available for registration, I'm not sure what the "in a limited way" is about. In Russia it's used to communicate old-schoolness, approximately.

Some IRC networks still use naming as such like "server.state.country.dal.net."

> Technically speaking, the top of the DNS tree, the DNS root, is a null label referenced by a trailing dot. It's analogous to the '/' at the beginning of POSIX file paths. "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu." to make it absolute rather than relative

I have never seen this, but I just tried it and it seems like browsers, even today will happily handle such URLs.

Neat!

My school didn't have a domain name or even an email address, or even an internet connection. I think it had 1 or 2 BBC Micros though. I remember playing a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something. Funny how memory works - I assumed I'd remember nothing as so long ago, but remember sitting in the room playing that game now, can't remember why I could though (why I had free access).

It did always make me really annoyed they didn’t deprecate .gov, .edu and .mil and transition to moving those under .us (as .gov.us, .edu.us and .mil.us).

Having them as basically US-only just reeks of American exceptionalism which most of the world finds very distasteful.

I had a us local domain back in the early 90s, back when uucp still ruled!

I didn’t realize how far these had fallen out of fashion. I maintained http://kenn.cr.k12.ia.us for a time, and it was so hard to remember that domain (scarcely easier than an IP address) until I tried to understand it. It’s now kennedy.crschools.us.

Cloudflare refuses to accept most locality based domains as delegated because they aren’t listed in the Public Suffix List[1]. So for example you can’t use Cloudflare DNS or get a TLS cert for it from them.

Fortunately they seem to be one of the few (only?) providers who does that. So use another DNS provider and Letsencrypt and you’re good to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List

Absolutely fascinating history. I thought I knew DNS fairly well and I had no idea that locality-based domains were even a thing.

Ah, what happened to the site design? It used to have a lovely background and monospace text.

Many US cities use .us for their official web pages

eg: www.ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us

Wow yes, I also remember my high school's k12 domain name! What an interesting trip down memory lane; wonderful, like most of computer.rip!

Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so?

> "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu."

https://www.gatech.edu./ does seem to work for me.

It is interesting that URLs often contain two hierarchies in opposite directions:

https://something.myorg.org/something/more/specific/

bergen might have dropped the ball but hunterdon’s still works and is in full use: https://www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/

Library ditched it for hclibrary.us though. Used to be able to telnet to the catalog at pac.hunterdon.lib.nj.us

The notion that community colleges can't use .edu no longer seems true. When I took community college classes, I got an @my.smccd.edu email address.

I grew up with *.pinellas.k12.fl.us and that domain remains seared into my memory.

The good old Internet was "del.icio.us".

If you want to create a subdomain, you need DNS delegation (authorization) from the owner/manager of the domain.

So if you want to register xyz.ci.pemberton.nj.us, you need to ask for DNS delegation from the owner/manager of ci.pemberton.nj.us or a higher level.

It's a lot easier to buy the xyz-ci-pemberton-nj.us domain.

> ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes of each country, and are intended for use by those countries, while gTLDs are arbitrary and reflect the fact that DNS was designed in the US. The ".gov" gTLD, for example, is for use by the US government, while the UK is stuck with ".gov.uk".

Fun fact, the UK's ISO country code is not actually "uk", but "gb". IIRC, ".uk" was grandfathered in (from JANET?) as an exception: ".gb" officially existed for a while in parallel, but no one ever used it and I think it's now defunct.

I had one but the "Delegated Manager" was a local dsl isp that went out of business and I lost the ability to update the name servers for it

Some minor/trivial corrections:

- gTLD stands for "generic TLD"[1], not a short form of global, comes from their "generic" usage. Both two categories of TLDs are in the domain namespace which is globally resolvable.

- Almost all of two-letter ASCII ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes, from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, but there are a few exceptions: the United Kingdom (GB) has ".uk"[2], Ascension Island (now part of SH) has ".ac", etc. (Yes, there are more non-ASCII ccTLDs: .新加坡, .УКР, etc.)

If you want to briefly take a look at how TLD registries structure their second/third level such as "k12.or.us" or "chiyoda.tokyo.jp", see "ICANN DOMAINS" section of the public suffix list[3] (note: it is not complete)

[1] https://icannwiki.org/Generic_Top-level_Domain

[2] https://cddo.blog.gov.uk/2022/11/15/is-it-time-to-retire-the...

[3] https://publicsuffix.org/