The first .com domain name was registered
On this day · 15 March 1985
On 15 March 1985, a Lisp-machine maker claimed symbolics.com — the first .com on the internet, still online today.
Six years before the World Wide Web existed, the commercial internet got its first address. On 15 March 1985, the Massachusetts computer firm Symbolics, Inc. registered symbolics.com — the very first .com domain name on the internet.
The company was a spin-off of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, famous for building Lisp machines, single-user workstations tuned to run the Lisp programming language. Registering a domain in 1985 was nothing like today’s instant checkout: you mailed or faxed a paper request to the Stanford Research Institute’s Network Information Center (SRI-NIC), which managed assignments on behalf of DARPA, then waited for a human to process it.
The rest of 1985 was quiet by modern standards. Only a handful of other firms — among them bbn.com, think.com and dec.com — registered domains that whole year.
Remarkably, symbolics.com is still registered and online, outliving the company that created it.
Sources & references
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