Every business that has ever typed a web address into a browser owes a small debt to a company most people have never heard of. On March 15, 1985, a computer maker called Symbolics registered Symbolics.com and, in doing so, became the first ever holder of a .com domain name. More than forty years later that address is still registered and still resolves - making it the oldest .com domain on the internet.
Who was Symbolics?
Symbolics Inc. was a Massachusetts company that built specialized computers called Lisp machines - workstations designed from the silicon up to run the Lisp programming language, then the darling of artificial intelligence research. These were serious, expensive machines aimed at labs and universities, and the company sat right at the cutting edge of 1980s computing. So it was fitting, if a little accidental, that they were first in line when commercial domains became available.
The domain name system itself was brand new. DNS had only been introduced in 1983 to replace the unwieldy HOSTS.TXT file that every machine on the early internet had to keep in sync. The now-familiar top-level domains - .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov - were defined in 1984. When registration opened, .com was meant for commercial entities, and Symbolics grabbed theirs before anyone else did.
