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Oldest Dot-com Domain Turning 30

Posted by Soulskill on from the counts-as-a-digital-antique dept.

netbuzz writes: On March 15, 1985, Symbolics, Inc, maker of Lisp computers, registered the Internet's first dot-com address: Symbolics.com. Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of that registration. And while Symbolics has been out of business for years, the address was sold in 2009 for an undisclosed sum to a speculator who said: "For us to own the first domain is very special to our company, and we feel blessed for having the ability to obtain this unique property." Today there's not much there.

2 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. It's been that long? by Snotnose · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a sysadmin in the late 80s/early 90s I remember the joy I felt when I first installed DNS on our Sun network and could forget bang paths. For the next year or two I enjoyed the extra income I made as a consultant setting up other people with DNS. It was all a word of mouth thing (well, word of email more like), I never advertised or looked for the work (I was still in school part time, free time wasn't in my lexicon).

  2. Symbolics instigated the free software movement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just to remind everyone about Symbolics' place in history. Symbolics was founded by a bunch of Richard Stallman's co-workers from the MIT AI lab, and Symbolics' business tactics provided the primary motivatation for the Stallman's creation of the Free Software movement. See

    http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html