Domain name .si celebrating 30 years
Ljubljana, 30 March - Slovenia's domain name .si was formally registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) root name server on 1 April 1992, and will thus celebrate its 30th anniversary on Friday. The latest data shows that there are 147,935 sites registered under the .si domain name.
Ljubljana
The Arnes public institution, part of which is Register.si, a guardian of Slovenia's .si domain name.
Photo: Arnes
File photo
In Slovenia, the national authority managing .si is Register.si, which is part of the public Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES), which was founded on 7 May 1992, less than a year after Slovenia became independent.
Register.si hailed the acquisition of the country's internet address as "a small step for mankind but a giant leap for Slovenia".
Before having its own domain name, Slovenia used Yugoslavia's .yu, which was assigned to the former Yugoslavia in 1989, when Slovenia was still one of its republics.
Once the federation collapsed, Slovenia was left with the .yu domain because the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana was in charge of Yugoslavia's .yu register Yunac. In 1994, the domain name was returned to Yugoslavia for the University of Belgrade to manage it.
Slovenia initially wanted to have a .sl domain name, but it had already been taken by Sierra Leone, Arnes director Marko Bonač says in a video interview on Register.si's website.
As to the question of which website was first registered under the .si domain name, Bonač says there were in fact several at once.
This is because they were initially registered under .yu - such as the Jožef Stefan Institute's ijs.yu or the University of Ljubljana's uni-lj.yu.
At the end of 1992, "we transferred these first ten domains registered under the Yugoslav domain name to Slovenia's own .si domain name".
The other early websites were also uni-mb.si, ki.si, arnes.si, aster.si, zrc-sazu.si, izum.si, pasadena.si, and hermes.si.
To mark the anniversary, Register.si intends to present this year its work and partners, the milestones from the past three decades and a number of curiosities.
President Borut Pahor will host today a reception remembering the domain name at Presidential Palace as part of his efforts to preserve the historical memory of milestones from 30 years ago which helped Slovenia on its way to independence and sovereignty.