Internet's First Registered Domain Name Sold

MojoKid writes "Believe it or not, it wasn't internet.com or dot.com that was acquired when the Internet was young. Instead, it was the somewhat off-the-wall name of symbolics.com. The Symbolics company was the first to use an internet domain name to guide Internet viewers to its line of Lisp machines, which were single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. XF.com Investments, which is a Missouri-based Internet investments firm, has managed to secure the domain name from its original owner for an undisclosed sum and XF's CEO was quick to proclaim his excitement over the acquisition. It's hard to say why this domain name was the first registered back on March 15, 1985, but for obvious reasons it holds a special place in history. There has been one original owner for nearly 25 years. Over that time, we've seen the Internet grow to the tune of 180,000,000+ registered domains, and thousands more are being added each and every day."

Comments

fp for sale

[Anonymous Coward]

make an offer.

Re:fp for sale

[JustOK]

But it's not the first fp, so it's not worth as much.

EPIC FAIL

[popo]

Imagine being able to choose any domain name you wanted.... ... and choosing "Symbolics.com".

Re:EPIC FAIL

[larry bagina]

in all fairness, .cx wasn't yet available.

Re:EPIC FAIL

[Daniel Dvorkin]

No, it makes perfect sense. You own a company called Symbolics, and you have the feeling this commercial-internet thing is going to be big. So you choose your domain name to represent the face you want to show to the internet at large: symbolics.com, the commercial site for Symbolics.

IOW, it's the domain system working the way it's supposed to. Before domain name squatting. Before the idea that a name alone, rather than the thing which the name is supposed to represent, embodies actual value becoming firmly embedded in the public mind. Before the sex.com ripoff, before Mike Rowe Soft, before all the other domain name silliness we've all seen far too much of.

I suppose you think he should have registered IBM.com and held out for piles of cash. Or maybe he should have paid a consulting firm another pile of cash to come up with some vaguely pleasant-sounding and utterly meaningless collection of syllables and stuck ".com" on the end. Or something.

Some people actually remember what the domain name system is for.

Re:EPIC FAIL

[adolf]

You don't remember the Internet, prior to somewhere around the September that never ended, very well, do you?

Re:EPIC FAIL

[lysergic.acid]

Hey, what do you have against Mike Rowe? That guy's an American hero. Not only is he the host of Dirty Jobs, one of the few good shows on Discovery channel (the other being Mythbusters), but he's also a very outspoken supporter of the trades and American blue-collar workers. He's even got a website dedicated to the issue of the decline in trades jobs/workers in America, which has been a contributing factor to the collapse of our physical infrastructure.

But, seriously, I absolutely agree with you. The domain name registration system is all fucked up. The registrars (the most successful of which typically have had close ties to the InterNIC/ICANN board) are making a killing already selling virtual goods (it's like printing money). The least they can do is to mitigate domain-squatting and domain-hijacking rather than to cooperate with and try to profit off of helping those scummy companies.

I don't know why being sick of scummy business practices make you a socialist, but if trademarks were abused in the same fashion we'd quickly start running out of legible company or product names. Oh, you want to register a company name that doesn't substitute numbers for letters or incorporate creative misspellings? That will be $5000, please.

I can understand the argument that capitalism is desirable for promoting healthy competition, driving down costs and increases product/service quality. But how do domain squatters/prospectors contribute anything positive to society? By driving the cost of decent domain names up? That benefits only the domain squatters/prospectors. They're the definition of a parasitic establishment—one whose actions benefits only themselves while harming the rest of society and draining its resources.

Re:EPIC FAIL

[paiute]

www.whoosh.com

Re:EPIC FAIL

[Darinbob]

The first domain name was acquired long before people thought of using the internet for advertising, or even commerce. The early sites were for customer support, not marketing. The big internet goldrush wouldn't happen for nearly a decade. The names were undoubtedly chosen because these organizations already existed on the set of networks collectively known as the "internet", it was only the domain registrar that was new.

It would be as pointless for Symbolics to choose cars.com as it would have been for IBM to choose movies.com as its domain name.

Also, these are all .COM domains. There is a bit of selective editing going on here for some reason. I notice this blog mentions that the first .EDU and .GOV registrrations were in 1985, but a couple of paragraphs later completely forgets this and doesn't include them when listing "only 6 domains were registered this year".

I also find it interesting that there were no more registrations for over a month until several domains were registered on April 24 1985 (including cmu.edu and berkeley.edu).

Re:EPIC FAIL

[cstacy]

Ok, lighten up.

First off, there are domain names like cars.com that one might have surmised would be very valuable -- and would not have been name squatting. How is this not "what the domain name system is for"?

I was at MIT, BBN, Symbolics, and various other places back then and was a "network liaison" (administrator) on the ARPANET. (I did an obscure early implementation of DNS, too.)

At the very beginning, it didn't occur to us that domain names would be traded as they are today, or that cybersquatting would be allowed. Toplevel names were supposed to be the names of organizations, and domain names were like host names (MIT-MC became MC.MIT.EDU). More abstract names (like "ftp" or "library" or "daily-scifi") might occur in the leaves, but not at toplevel.

There were rules about who was allowed to register domain names; it was not a free-for-all where anyone could obtain a .COM domain. To qualify for a .COM, you had to represent that you were a multinational corporation with some large number of hosts (and that didn't mean consumer class personal computers, yet) coming on the network. To get a .ORG you had to be certified as a non-profit organization, and to get a .NET you had to be some kind of ISP. If you were just a small company, or an individual, you were supposed to register for a locality domain name (such as joeswidgets.boston.ma.us). (My own personal US domain was one of the first of those, actually.) The domain registration rules loosened up very soon after: I registered some other early .COM domains for small US-only companies about six months after SYMBOLICS.COM was registered.

At some point, more or less anything could get registered. People such as myself were well positioned all along to just grab all the good names long before there was anyone else around. We could have all been millionaires, if we'd had the foresight to be unscrupulous cheaters. It's not that we didn't realize that cybersquatting would be lucrative. It just seemed like it would be a wrong and unethical thing to do, if you actually got away with it. I guess our imaginations failed in that respect. I guess we were chumps.

Even before the Internet, we discussed how people might utilize "the worldnet" and what kind of problems would occur. But mostly we thought about it very much like how we viewed our familiar ARPANET -- it would be like the research network we were accustomed to except a little less idealized, with many more people and lots of random personal email and stuff. Spam had yet to be invented. There was no online ordering of books or goods. The grapes in my local grocery store did not have a URL on the label. There were no URLs yet! There was no web. Domain squatting or other infrastructure gaming was unimaginable: surely only properly validated names would be registered. And anyway, the DNS was never supposed to be the way that end users would locate services, anyway. There were supposed to be high level directory services, with DNS just an implementation detail. Directories never happened like was envisioned, and search engines were invented, instead. So to some degree that has finally happened now: many people just type things at Google and use bookmarks, and never really think much about domain names. And who actually types "cars.com" into a browser and expects any particular useful result?

Stallman and symbolics

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

    That company crops up in various stories. Before Richard Stallman decided to launch the GNU project to give people freedom, he spent two years out-programming Symbolics as punishment for their destruction of MIT's hacker community. Here's where some of the story can be found, about half way down.

Re:Stallman and symbolics

[Anonymous Coward]

And here's some more of the story.

Nice HW though!

[KC1P]

I never drank the Lisp Kool-Aid so I wasn't into lispms, but we had a Symbolics machine in college (is 3600 a model? that's all my dusty brain can cough up) and the keyboard was a real work of art! You had to stare at it for a while just to notice the QWERTY part floating in the ocean of other keys. The UI was pretty slick too. If only there were something like this for a language I *liked*.

Re:Nice HW though!

[vbraga]

Pictures for Lisp Machine keyboard.

Why Symbolics?

[lennier]

" It's hard to say why this domain name was the first registered back on March 15, 1985,"

I'd guess maybe because Symbolics was the original MIT spinoff Lisp machine company, and during the 80s Lisp was the Artificial Intelligence language poised to become THE lingua franca for computing, everywhere.

The GUI was invented on Lisp machines. Emacs was inspired by Lisp machines.

1985 was the heyday of the Strategic Computing Initiative which funnelled US $1 billion into the attempt to build, basically, a literal Skynet - the last great push for coordinated defense AI.

In 1985 Cisco was a year old and ARPANET had only been running this newfangled TCP/IP thing for two. If you were to pick one company to, ahem, symbolise the shiny face of tomorrow - well, other than maybe IBM or Bolt, Beranek and Newman - yeah, Symbolics would have been way up there.

I still miss that future we didn't get to see.

You need a history lesson

[WebCowboy]

Unless you define the internet as the .com name space.

The .com TLD is not the internet name space, but the internet namespace does include the .com TLD, so it standa to reason that a .com domain could be the first registered on the internet.

The .edu name space is older and was just as much the internet.

.arpa, .com, .edu, .gov, .mil and .org TLDs were all established simultaneously in an RFC published in the fall of 1984. None of them is technically older than any of the others. Practically speaking though the first officially registered and functioning domain name on the internet is SYMBOLICS.COM came into being on March 1985, predating the approximately simultaneous registration of several university .edu domains by about a month.

If you want to be pedantic there were perhaps dozens of internet domain names that simultaneously became the "first domain names". These were all .arpa domains and were all temporary. Prior to the establishment of any internet-wide root nameservers resolving hostnames to domain names used a resolver that read a locally stored text file called hosts. The hosts file was generated and maintained centrally by university researchers and manually downloaded by sysadmins to EVERY COMPUTER ON THE INTERNET that needed to resolve hostnames. The "official" hosts file of the internet was flat in structure--there was no defined levels like today. An informal structure was established using hyphens as separators (a host might be named in a pattern like COMPUTERNAME-UNIVERSITYNAME) but there was no standards applied or technical significance to the structure as there is in today's DNS.

When the nameservers came online they were set up with the official hosts file as it existed at that time, within the .arpa TLD. The .arpa TLD was meant to be temporary--it allowed internet hosts to transition to DNS client resolvers from hostname files seamlessly. Config files, databases, etc. may have referred to hosts by name, and by using the temporary .arpa TLD the name resolver could be changed without disruption (note how name resolution works to this day--if you do not use a FQDN your computer appends the supplied hostname to the domain of your own host--since at the beginning all domain names were .arpa this scheme allowed dns resolution to behave exactly like the original hostname file).

All those .arpa domains are gone now--but the .arpa TLD did become permanent--when standards for doing REVERSE lookups were established the domain in-addr.arpa was created. There are a handful of .arpa domains that exist to manage the inner workings of various DNS functions, but .arpa has never been open to domain registrations from the public--all .arpa domains are established through internet standards.

So, though .arpa domains were technically the firs, YOU are wrong and the article summary was RIGHT. symbolics com was the first REGISTERED domain on the entire public internet.

Re:Who is the joker who tags every story "story"?

[Kalriath]

For some reason though, it wont let us negate it with "!story"