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.

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

[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?

Re:Stallman and symbolics

[Anonymous Coward]

And here's some more of the story.