Symbolics.com, registered on March 15, 1985 is the first, and oldest, registered domain name out of approximately 275,000,000 domain names in existence. It celebrates its 30th Birthday this Sunday.
Symbolics.com was the first domain name registered on the Web
According to the website, it was registered by Symbolics Computer Corporation. Symbolics designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. The Lisp Machine was the first commercially available “workstation†(although that word had not yet been coined). Symbolics also made significant advances in software technology, and offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s
In August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments. Now Symbolics.com offers a few unique advertising opportunities for select companies.
Additionally, Symbolics.com was the first ever .com registered on the Internet.
“It was easy when only .com was around in 1985, however in 2014 alone 420 new domain endings were launched,†said Christopher Hofman Laursen, the CEO of European Domain Centre.
In recent years, there has been an explosion in extensions. In 2012, ICANN decided to make new domain endings possible. From 1985 to 2013, there were 258 extensions launched. These included generic endings such as .com and country code endings such as .co.uk, .de, .cn, etc. In 2014, there came 420 new domain endings such as .guru, .marketing and .london.
In 2015, it is expected that hundreds more will follow, including “dot-brand†extensions such as .bmw.