On 23 December 1987, the first of the domains of the national network, cnuce.cnr.it, was registered at CNR-CNUCE. With the first .it domain name, by delegation of the American IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), Registro .it, the registry of .it domain managed - from the outset - by the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of CNR in Pisa (CNR-IIT), heir of the CNUCE, was also born, by virtue of the technical and scientific skills acquired by its researchers. Today there are more than 3,470 million .it domains and they rank fourth in Europe and seventh worldwide in terms of number of domains registered in the ccTLDs
35 years have passed since the first registration, when the first .it domain, cnuce.cnr.it, was created on 23 December 1987: thirty-five years later, no one could have imagined that there would be more than 3,470 million Italian Internet domains, ranking fourth in Europe and seventh in worldwide terms.
In 1987, there was still no www and only .com, .net and .org domains existed: it was only later that it was decided to identify each country on the Net with a two-letter extension (.it, .de, .fr, etc.), thus giving rise to the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). Italy was not unprepared, on the strength of another record achieved the previous year, again thanks to the National Research Council of Italy (CNR): on 30 April 1986, the first Italian connection to the Internet was made, the result of the work of researchers at the then CNUCE, formerly the CNR institute. A “ping” left from Pisa, a signal directed to the United States, Roaring Creek, in Pennsylvania, which travelled on satellite “roads” and inaugurated the Italian Internet network.
Twenty months later, IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) assigned to the CNR the delegation for the registration of .it domains, thanks to the technical and scientific skills of its researchers and experts, the fourth in order of time in Europe to adopt the Internet Protocol (IP). This was the birth of Registro .it, the registry of .it domains, managed by the Institute of Informatics and Telematics in Pisa, heir of the CNUCE: if until then it had been sufficient to keep a manual “registry” of the unique address (IP) consisting of a series of digits, which identified each individual computer, with the increase in registration requests it was decided to give names to those numbers, which were easier to remember, thus dividing the space of the Net into zones and inaugurating the Domain Name System (DNS).