I've seen a lot of people reblogging this as a shitpost but it actually is ~technically~ true, if you're willing to give the literal text "lentils.com" a bit of leeway. The modern DNS or "Domain Name System" wasn't established until 1985, and was created to establish human-readable addresses for IP addresses, so you didn't have to know the actual IP address of the website you wanted to visit. In other words, you don't need to call up the world carrot museum and ask for their IP address in order to visit their website, you can just go to worldcarrotmuseum.co.uk.
HOWEVER, the DNS system wasn't created whole-cloth, it was based on a library topic-categorization system that predated the dewey decimal system and was widely used across private and government libraries in england and, later, the united states. The system was called the Index Dominiorum, or "Register of Domains," and was pioneered by the Library of Oxford in 1731. It's first ever use was for the tracking and maintenance of agricultural records for major staple crops, with the list distinguishing between commercial and independently-grown crops, as subsistence farming was still how a lot of people got their food in england at the time. In this register of crop reports, one of the first (not the actual first first) records added to the list was a report on the production of commercial lentils, labeled "lentils, com." Because that same core registration system was used as the basis for the DNS nearly 3 centuries later, it can be argued that "lentils.com" was one of the first domains ever registered, along with similar commercial crop names like "barley.com", "rye.com", and "bulgur-wheat.com". Unfortunately, none of this is true, and i did just make it all up.
