The internet's first .com was registered 40 years ago today -- six years before the launch of the web
In 1985, at a time when we were listening to the likes of Careless Whisper by George Michael and Material Girl by Madonna, and getting ready to go Back to the Future, Symbolics Computer Corporation was developing Lisp machines for use in early AI work. On March 15, 1985, 40 years ago today, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm registered what was to be the world’s first .com domain name, symbolics.com.
In those days, well before the launch of the World Wide Web in 1991, requests were submitted by fax or mail and approved manually by the Stanford Research Institute under the Defense Data Network contract. The symbolics.com registration marked the beginning of commercial web addresses and came more than a decade before .com domain names became widely used by businesses and individuals.