Can you imagine an Internet that didn't rely on .com to get you from here to there? Not only is it such an integral part of how we use the Internet on a daily basis, but it's also the top address. But did you know that the dot-com will turn thirty this year?
We've been using the Internet with dot-com addresses for a long time. The dot-com URL ending stood for commercial and was designed to help distinguish for-profit sites from non-profit sites, which would host their content at more appropriate URLs like dot-org or dot-net. Dot-com web addresses are still the most popular URLs in the world and will likely hold that title for the rest of the Internet's history. But who actually registered the first dot-com URL?
According to CNNMoney, the first dot-com address (symbolics.com) was registered by Symbolics Inc. on March 15, 1985. Symbolics Inc was a computer developer that spent most of its time making Lisp Machines, which were what businesses and creators used to manage their computer data before personal computers became the normal device to own. The site acted as a portal for discovering more about Symbolics and their hardware.
Despite having this infamous address, Symbolics Inc. shut down in 2005 after having financial problems and left its famous web address empty for five years. However, one company saw a lot of potential with it.
Internet domain name acquisition firm XF.com told CNN Money that they called Symbolics' owner in 2009 about acquiring the domain. The computer company was in a poor financial position, so it transferred its main site to another URL and sold symbolics.com to XF.com's owner Aron Meystedt for an undisclosed amount. Meystedt then converted the site into a monument to the first dot-com address. Visitors can travel around the site and look at a variety of facts and stories about the history of the Internet. According to Meystedt, the site gets thousands of visitors on a daily basis and is a perfect source for ad revenue. But Meystedt's main job an a domain manager for Heritage Auctions put a damper on the site turning into a reliable source for revenue.
But regardless of who owns the site, symbolics.com stands as the birthplace of the modern URL.
