Symbolics.com: The First Domain Name Ever Registered
Zusammenfassung
Symbolics.com was registered on March 15, 1985 — the first domain name ever added to the DNS root. Symbolics Inc. was a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that manufactured Lisp Machines: specialized computers optimized for running Lisp programs, which were then the primary language of artificial intelligence research. Symbolics is gone; the domain passed through several owners and is now maintained as a historical computing museum website. The technical infrastructure that made the registration possible — the Domain Name System — had been published as an RFC only two years earlier.
Before the Domain Name System
Before DNS, networked computers identified each other by IP addresses and by a single text file: HOSTS.TXT, maintained by the Stanford Research Institute Network Information Center (SRI-NIC) and distributed to every ARPANET host by FTP every few days. The file mapped hostnames to IP addresses. In 1973, HOSTS.TXT had a few hundred entries. By 1982, it had grown to the point where the update process was straining both the SRI-NIC’s bandwidth and the patience of network administrators who had to download and install a new file every time a new host was added.
Paul Mockapetris at the Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) designed DNS in 1983 and published it as RFC 882 and RFC 883. The design was distributed: instead of one file at one location, a hierarchy of name servers each authoritative for their portion of the namespace would answer queries. Top-level domains — .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, .mil, and country codes — would each have authoritative name servers. The system could scale without requiring a central registry to track every hostname. The full story of DNS is covered in The Domain Name System.
The First Six Registrations
The Domain Name System became operational in 1984. The first domain registrations under the new system occurred in 1985:
| Date | Domain |
|---|---|
| March 15, 1985 | Symbolics.com |
| April 24, 1985 | BBN.com |
| May 24, 1985 | Think.com |
| July 11, 1985 | MCC.com |
| September 30, 1985 | DEC.com |
| November 7, 1985 | Northrop.com |
Symbolics.com was first not because Symbolics had any particular interest in web presence — the World Wide Web would not exist for another six years — but because the company had a research and engineering culture closely connected to the MIT AI Lab and the ARPANET community that was actively deploying DNS.
What Symbolics Was
Symbolics Inc. was founded in 1980 by former members of the MIT AI Lab. The company built Lisp Machines: dedicated hardware optimized for running Lisp with hardware support for garbage collection, tagged memory, and Lisp-specific instruction sets. The Symbolics 3600 series (1983) was used by AI researchers, financial institutions modeling complex derivative structures, and NASA for space program simulation.
Lisp Machines represented the high-water mark of the theory that specialized hardware would outperform general-purpose computers for AI workloads. By the mid-1980s, this theory was being challenged by workstations running Lisp interpreters and, eventually, by the AI Winter that collapsed investment in symbolic AI systems. Symbolics’s revenue peaked at just under $200 million in fiscal 1986.
The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1993 and was defunct by 1996. Its software assets were acquired by Symbolics Inc. (a separate company that later became open source). The domain was purchased by a private buyer in 2009, who has maintained it as a historical computing museum. The Expert Systems era in which Symbolics thrived is described in Expert Systems and the First AI Winter.
Registration Was Free
In 1985, domain registration had no fee. The DNS infrastructure was a public research resource. SRI-NIC handled registration requests via email; you specified the domain name, an administrative contact, and name server information, and the registration was processed manually. The commercial domain name registration industry — Network Solutions, later GoDaddy and hundreds of competitors — did not exist.
Network Solutions received the first contract to charge for domain registrations in 1995, at $100 for two years ($50/year). The introduction of fees prompted considerable objection from the internet community, which had treated registration as a free public resource. The objections did not prevail. Today, over 350 million domain names are registered worldwide. Symbolics.com was the first.