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."

Re:First .COM, not First Domain

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this informative if he says "first .com not domain".

What was the first domain, Professor Hawking?

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:First .COM, not First Domain

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Did you and the two cluebots who modded you informative even bother to RTFT (Title)?

It says First Domain Name Sold.

All other domains prior to this symbolics.com domain were not sold, they were given to their (mostly) university, government and military owners for free.

You mean the title on the slasdot post that says "Internet's First Registered Domain Name Sold"? or the title on the article itself that says "Internet's First Registered Domain Is Finally Sold, But For How Much?"?

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 [cirtex.com] 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:Summary is wrong

[SEAL]

According to wikipedia:

symbolics.com is actually older than any currently registered edu domain, beating Berkeley by a month.
nordu.net was registered a couple months prior to symbolics.

I'm not sure about .mil or deprecated .arpa domains - they are hard to check up on.

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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] - yeah, Symbolics would have been way up there.

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

Re:Why Symbolics?

[cstacy]

" 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 [wikipedia.org] company, and during the 80s Lisp was the Artificial Intelligence language poised to become THE lingua franca for computing, everywhere.

[...]

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

Some of your details are a little off, but you are conceptually accurate. I lived that future, and since then I've felt like I've been transported back to the stone knives and bearskins, and Spock is nowhere in sight.

Re:EPIC FAIL

[TheThiefMaster]

On Slashdot, you are truly a god among men. Even though you didn't predict this future, to have witnessed the history between then and now is an honour many of us have not had.

How many of the rest of us wish we could have been where you have? To have watched the Internet unfold from the ARPANET into truly unimaginable thing it is today?

So what happened to Symbolics to make them sell?

[Viol8]

Have they gone bust or did they go bust years ago and what was left of the company kept the name? Did a former CTO squirrel it away somewhere for a rainy day and $$$$ ?