The first .com domain name, symbolics.com, was created on March 15, 1985, by Massachusetts computer company Symbolics Inc.
The first domain name, created in January of 1985, was actually Nordu.net, which was used to serve as the identifier of the first root server, nic.nordu.net. Symbolics.com was the first domain name to be registered through the DNS (Domain Name System) process.
At that time, the Internet was a noncommercial medium used more as a military and academic tool. It would be years before the World Wide Web and web browsers allowed just about everything and everyone to be represented with a .com address.
Only five other companies registered a domain name in 1985: bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com, and northrop.com. Other notable computer companies registered their domains over the next several years, including IBM, Sun, Intel, and AMD in 1986, Apple and Cisco Systems in 1987, and Microsoft in 1991. Today, over 342 million domain names exist, and more than 137 million are .com extensions.
In 2009, symbolics.com was sold to XF.com, a domain-aggregation company. XF.com founder Aron Meystedt said on the site: "For me, personally, I am excited (and honored) to hold the first .com ever registered. Since domain names are my business, I am happy to be the owner of this fantastic piece of Internet history."
Symbolics was conceived at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and is best-known for designing and manufacturing a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. The machines became the first commercially available "general-purpose computers" or "workstations" before those terms were coined.
The company also wrote a fully object-oriented operating system and development environment called "Genera" to run on those workstations. Its software was used to create scenes in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock," among other things.
Symbolics was a member of the Route 128 corridor of high-tech firms that contributed to economic growth's "Massachusetts Miracle" period. The company still exists today as a privately held company that sells and maintains its products but has a new address: symbolics-dks.com.