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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.

13 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Re:may not be much there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    how symbolic

  2. I wish I "cdr" seen it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    nothing to see here, "car"y on...

  3. 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).

    1. Re:It's been that long? by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's not that long. Even before this registering of the domain, the "internet" was already underway. What the registering did was provide a common name that everyone could agree upon so that you didn't have to use the IP address directly and you could use DNS so that you didn't have to enter all your favorites into the hosts table.

      Also symbolics.com was NOT the first domain. First registrations were darpa.org/darpa.net/darpa.gov and nordu.net. Not only was nordu.net there on the first day, it is also the oldest domain that is still active. For the next registration after symbolics.com, there was bbn.com on the same day as several .EDU domains. The .EDU domains far outnumbered .COM domains during 1985, which makes sense because the internet was highly academic in nature, and even the early commercial domains were primarily using it in their research divisions.

      I found it odd that when searching for this list (it's on wikipedia) that I easily found several other hits that listed only the early .COM domains and it took a lot more digging to find hits listing all the early domains. But I guess that in the modern era that only for-profit commercial companies matter to the mass media and general public.

    2. Re:It's been that long? by Darinbob · · Score: 2

      I should clarify, the DARPA registrations were for the TLDs only (ie, ORG/NET/EDU/GOV, but not COM for some reason). But nordu.net still registered before symbolics.com.

    3. Re:It's been that long? by rs79 · · Score: 2

      Nope, digital.com predates symbolics.com. NSI screwed up the dates. Check with Reid who don't forget enabled BIND by paying Vixie to write it when they were both at DECWRL.How could anyhting predate the domain of the guys that wrote the code?

      --
      Need Mercedes parts ?
  4. bbn.com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    bbn.com was registered 9 days later - still around, doing the same thing - government sponsored research.

  5. 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

    1. Re:Symbolics instigated the free software movement by bigwheel · · Score: 2

      Symbolics was an amazing company. I was doing AI R&D for a large company back in the 80's, where we had several 3670s and 3640s. Even after all these years, I have not seen anything as robust and easy to work with as Lisp+Flavors on their Genera environment.

  6. Oldest still held by same company is XEROX.COM by alispguru · · Score: 5, Informative

    Number 7 on the list of oldest registered domain names.

    BBN is apparently owned by Raytheon.

    Apple.com is number 64, just under two years later. One of the benefits of getting in on the ground floor like that was big blocks of IPv4 addresses - apple.com still controls a /24 block, I think.

    When did microsoft.com get created?

    My personal intro to the internet was at the University of Maryland - I was there when the TAC to Ft. Meade was installed.

    --

    To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
    1. Re:Oldest still held by same company is XEROX.COM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      /24 is *SMALL*

      Try /8

      NetRange: 17.0.0.0 - 17.255.255.255
      CIDR: 17.0.0.0/8
      NetName: APPLE-WWNET
      NetHandle: NET-17-0-0-0-1
      Parent: ()
      NetType: Direct Assignment
      OriginAS:
      Organization: Apple Inc. (APPLEC-1-Z)
      RegDate: 1990-04-16
      Updated: 2012-04-02
      Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-17-0-0-0-1

  7. SYMBOLICS IS NOT THE FIRST DOT COM by rs79 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Everyone gets this wrong.

    BIND was written at Digital when Brian Reid looked at Mockapetris spec and got Vixie to take the Berkeley B-Tree code and produce BIND.

    Now what do you suppose the chances are that he didn't bother to grab digital.com? How bout zero? If you guessed that, you deserve a cookie.

    Reid has the nic receipt for digital.com and it predates symbolics.com. February vs. March, NSI screwed up the dates in one of their transitions.

    Ref: Brian Reid. Ask him yourself. This was explained on one of the domain mailing lists during the DNS wars.

    --
    Need Mercedes parts ?
  8. Remember how .coms were treated back then? by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

    I remember how SOME people treated .com domains back then. They'd refuse to route traffic for them, blackhole emails, and generally be little bitches about it. Why? Because .com meant TEH CAPITLIZM!!@#! OMG NOES and the internet was a strict non-.commercial zone. Anyone else remember the good old days before the WWW?

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!