Last Saturday, March 15, marked 40 years since the registration of the first domain name in the .COM generic top-level domain, Symbolics.com. The name of the official who was tasked with documenting it was lost to history, but it is definitely known that the domain was registered in 1980 by Symbolics, Inc., a company that produced the precursors of what would later be called personal computer. Domain Gang, which reported the news, recalls, somewhat nostalgically, that registering a domain name didn’t cost anything back then.
Some sources claim mistakenly that Symbolics.com is the world’s first domain name ever registered. This is incorrect: both the development of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the modern internet, and the registration of domain names were carried out by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which registered the very first domain names, darpa.org, darpa.net and darpa.edu, back in January 1985. But the fact that the name Symbolics.com was the first to be registered in the .COM domain is beyond dispute.
Symbolics, Inc. was shut down, but in 2009, the owners of the domain agreed to sell it to entrepreneur and domain investor Aaron Meystedt. The sum paid was not disclosed, but Meystedt says the purchase was a happy coincidence: he was lucky to be the first to make an offer when the owners were seeking to sell the domain.
Since then, Meystedt has received numerous offers from the biggest domain market players to sell the domain. However, in a recent interview, he said he considered the domain a unique digital asset; the price he could agree to sell it for is obviously “unrealistic and unacceptable” for the market. Just yesterday, two websites – GoDaddy and Saw.com – updated their estimates of the potential value of Symbolics.com: $20 and $18 million respectively. However, it must be considered that these are automatically generated estimates that have nothing to do with the position of the domain owner.
