A bit of history
The history of ebd.csic.es domain is deeply intertwined with the birth of the Spanish internet itself, and the dates are remarkably precise. The .es country-code top-level domain was established by IANA on February 14, 1988, and immediately delegated to Centro de Comunicaciones CSIC-RedIRIS (ES-NIC). This makes the .es domain one of the earliest European ccTLDs, and crucially, CSIC was its very first manager — meaning csic.es and its subdomains like ebd.csic.es were effectively native to the system from day one. By late 1988 I was already somehow familiar with html and started designing a website using Mosaic (and later Netscape Communications).
Although .es was created in 1988, actual domain registrations came slowly. The very first registration was nic.es in 1990, created by RedIRIS itself. The first external institution still active today is iac.es (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias), registered in 1991. During this period registrations were free of charge, assigned on a first-come-first-served basis, and exclusively for academic and research institutions. Since CSIC was the administrative body running ES-NIC, csic.es and all its institute subdomains — including ebd.csic.es — were almost certainly among the very earliest registrations, likely 1990–1991.
The hostname ebd10.ebd.csic.es follows the classic early-1990s convention of naming machines sequentially within an institution’s subdomain. In this scheme ebd.csic.es was EBD’s institutional zone, and ebd10 was a specific physical machine (actually a small Apple Mac IIci) that I used to serve as the first web/FTP server. That was an ubiquitous naming pattern in RedIRIS-connected institutions between 1990 and 1995.
This is a brief summary table of the temporal progression:
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| Feb 1988 | .es ccTLD created; delegated to CSIC/RedIRIS |
| mid-late 1988 | I started developing the website and started serving the site by March 1989 (still no TCP/IP) |
| 1990 | First .es registration (nic.es); Spain’s first TCP/IP internet link |
| 1991 | First external .es domain (iac.es); ebd.csic.es likely registered |
| 1994 | CSIC formally takes over RedIRIS management |
| 1995 | Commercial demand for .es explodes; academic monopoly ends |
| Aug 1996 | Formal paid registration rules introduced; RedIRIS separates registry from services |
| 2000 | Spanish Ministry of Industry takes .es management from RedIRIS; RED.ES created |
As a domain ebd.csic.es has existed since approximately late 1990–early 1991, and ebd10.ebd.csic.es as a hostname has been in DNS since the late to mid-1990s. The oldest Wayback Machine snapshot of the actual website is in WebArchive. Here is a visual summary.
1989-1996 The very early site, designed with NCSA Mosaic. And later (1994) using Netscape Communications.
2000.
2001.
2003.
2003.
2007.
2014.
2018.
Present.