Mysterious domain name

[dr_whom]

The website for the computer science department of the University of Toronto can be found at cs.toronto.edu.

That seems very sensible, except for one thing. There is no toronto.edu. The domain name for the University of Toronto is utoronto.ca. There's nothing at www.toronto.edu, for example.

But there's also nothing at cs.utoronto.ca. It's like the computer science department exists in a nearby alternate universe where the only difference is that the university has a different domain name.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

my guess is that the toronto cs department were earlier of adopters than the university as a whole, and they snagged the toronto.edu domain name early on (before the advent of either norms or, starting in 2001, regulations that .edu was reserved for US universities), and by the time the university got around to getting a general domain name it was clear that utoronto.ca was more consistent with standard web usage and was better branding for them, but the cs department didn't want to give up its early adopter cred either. (there's a small chance that the cs department or its institutional predecessor snagged the toronto.edu during the window in the 1980s when .edu existed by .ca didn't, but i'm thinking that's not likely.)

[q10.livejournal.com]

wait no toronto.edu is listed as having been created in 1986, and it looks like .ca came into existence in 1987. yeah, if i were them i'd want to hang onto that as a mark of pride too.

[q10.livejournal.com]

okay archive.org says that in late 1997 both www.toronto.edu and www.utoronto.ca gave took you to equivalent-looking front pages, and at some point the former just got redirected to the latter, and then seems to have shut down completely.

[inthelemonlight.livejournal.com]

I noticed this about the math department the other week!