The First Domain Name Ever Registered, Symbolics.com

The Oldest Domain Name Online

If you had your pick of any domain name in the world, what would it be? Bomb.com? Tennis.net?

A Masachusetts computer company had their pick of the litter all the way back on March 15th, 1985. They went with Symbolics.com. The rest is history.

While it may sound obscure, symbolics is actually a word meaning the study of ancient symbols. The original Symbolics went under, and the domain sold in 2009 to entrepreneur Aron Meystedt. Here’s what Aron had to say today:

“The Symbolics Computer Company was based out of Masachusetts – and has since closed up shop. Back in the 80s they were pioneers in computing (from the conversations that I’ve had with employees of the former computer company) and they were really on the right track to be a major force in the industry. The Symbolics Computer Company created a line of Lisp machines, which were computers designed to run the Lisp (List Processing Language) programming language. For those interested in further history and technical data, please visit the following link; this is a thorough history compiled by the Symbolics Company, long ago. This shows a great history of the company as well as Lisp machines.

Today, Symbolics.com remains the first (and oldest) registered domain of approximately 250,000,000 registered domain names on the Internet.

The other 4 domains that round out the original 5 registrations include:
#2 BBN.com – owned by Raytheon
#3 Think.com – owned by Oracle
#4 MCC.com – ownership under privacy protection
#5 DEC.com – owned by HP.
It’s worth noting that DEC.com was the home of the Digitial Equipent Corporation, another Massachusetts based early computer company – which was acquired by Compaq in 1998 (which merged with Hewlett Packard 4 years later).”

UPDATE: It has been brought to our attention that there is another domain name just as old as Symbolics.com. Nordu.net shows a DomainTools.com registration date of March 15th, 1985.

Symbolics via Domaining

Comments

comments