"first" computer on the internet

[Eric Smith]

Ray Arachelian wrote:
> Yes, perhaps in the very early days that was
> feasible, but not a bit later, not right around 1994 when we started 
> seeing www.domainname.tld hosts.

Even then, it was rare for a company to have an internet host that did 
nothing but act as a web server.  Internet-facing services were 
typically either on a single server or distributed onto a small number 
of servers, so using standardized hostnames for services allowed the 
specific machine assignments to be done transparently, and also allowed 
some uniformity for remote users, being able to expect 
www.somecompany.com to be a web server, rather than having to know that 
for that particular company the web server was 
server3.nw.mt.somecompany.com.

It wasn't until more recent times that it has become common practice to 
use a dedicated machine for many or all services, and even now, that 
trend may be reversing as services are deployed on virtual machines 
running on a shared physical machine.

Eric