The internet revolution started silently: You can not imagine what the first .com was

March 15, 1985

The first domain name in history is registered. The first dot-com address is bought by a computer company that few have heard of today, Symbolics.

In fact, it would take another four years for this Massachusetts-based company to launch Symbolics.com before the World Wide Web was created.

At the time, no one imagined that one day, domain names like business.com or sex.com would be worth their weight in gold. At that time, the internet had no commercial use, but it was mainly a military and academic tool for very few.

Today, companies pay as much as possible to secure their brand domain name, but at that time, no one was in a hurry to register a dot-com address. It is indicative that throughout 1985 only five domains were registered. And as you would expect, the first 100 addresses sold were mostly to computer companies. Apple acquired its own domain on February 19, 1987, and was just the 64th address to be sold. Microsoft waited until 1991 to buy its own domain.

Symbolics was building computer workstations and software at the time, which were used, among other things, to create some Star Trek scenes. However, the “Lisp” computer language developed by the company eventually ceased to be popular, with Symbolics declining and declaring bankruptcy in 1993.

But both the company and symbolics.com survive to this day, even if their fortunes are now separated. Symbolics maintains the Lisp operating system, which is still used by even a few companies and government agencies.

However, in 2009, the company agreed to sell the world’s oldest site to businessman Aron Meystedt.

Meystedt had set up a small domain name registration company and thought that having the oldest address in the world would be a good advertisement. For its part, Symbolics wanted to raise money to continue its operation and so agreed to leave this historic domain and “move” to symbolics-dks.com.

Meystedt quickly realized that symbolics.com had a steady stream of visitors, without the slightest ad. Hundreds or even thousands of people visit it every day and every year hundreds of thousands of clicks on symbolics.com are made by internet users who are curious as soon as they learn the history of the first dot-com.

So Meystedt decided to turn it into a “museum” of the Internet. To make money from its purchase, it accepts ads on the site.

According to the information you read on symbolics.com, today there are 366,300,000 registered domain names on the internet and in fact 1 million new domains are registered every month.

As for Meystedt himself, he states that he does not intend to sell symbolics.com, although many domain names are now changing hands to seven-digit or even eight-digit amounts.

Money Review

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