Symbolics.com marked its birthday on Sunday, March 15. Although this event passed without any fanfare, it nevertheless can be considered very important for the entire global net. Symbolics.com is the internet’s oldest domain name. It was registered on March 15, 1985, recalls the Domain Gang. Naturally, neither the domain industry, nor the internet as we know it now existed at that time. Nobody had heard of domain names then, except for specialists and companies that developed new technologies. One of them was Symbolics, a computer manufacturer from Massachusetts, USA. It registered the first ever domain name to match its brand.
Indeed, the company has not survived to this day: it went defunct in May 1996. Symbolics.com, however, lives on. It was purchased by the Napkin.com (then XF.com) investment company in August 2009. For some time, the domain featured a site that sold advertising space in the first ever domain. Currently, Symbolics.com is home to the The Big Internet Museum. It presents online the details of the most significant stages of the global web development: from technology and peripheral devices to games and memes. The collection is not too impressive, but the very idea of hosting such a museum in the first ever domain definitely deserves praise.
