"Sun.com was the first website I ever visited on the internet at [The Cyberia] cafe in London in 1995. It was advertised on the back page of a magazine in the U.K. if I remember correctly," one poster on the Sun blog reminisced.

, Sun.com is the 11th oldest .com name ; oddly enough, Oracle now also owns the third oldest, Think.com. In .com's nascent days on the Internet of the late 1980s, Sun Microsystems beat Intel and AT&T to the domain name registrars.

Oracle has not responded yet to inquiries about what it plans to do with Sun.com, but it has a variety of options.

Should CEO Larry Ellison fret over meeting analyst estimates during a tough quarter, the company could also "park" the name, to use the parlance of domain name resellers. This means Oracle would contract with a third-party service to fill the site with ads. Internet monitoring service Alexa that Sun.com traffic is still considerable: It is the 2,277th most popular destination on the Web.

It could hold on to it for a future brand centered around the name. Or it could just to hold onto it as an asset that it could sell outright later. "Many people look at domain names as great investments," Kupietzky said. The name "can be held for future sale in the expectation of a rising valuation."