I registered a domain on the ARPANET (pre-cursor to the Internet) in 1988. Back then Network Solutions' stewardship of the COM, NET, and ORG top-level domains had not become a thing yet, in fact this would've been prior to InterNIC (which I think is what Network Solutions was originally? I forget to be honest). But there was certainly no such thing as a commercial domain registrar like Godaddy, that's for sure.

In those days the National Science Foundation ran things, and you had to have sponsorship to have an entry added to the ARPA hosts table. Ours came through the math department at he local university, where my friend's parents were both professors. His dad ran the VAX cluster at the university and had the NSF hookups to get sponsorship.

In those days all this gained us was dialup access to their Netblazer modem pool at the university, and UUCP (Usenet feeds) access for our bulletin board system (BBS). Back then having both Fidonet and Usenet was nice to have.