On March 15, 1985, a Massachusetts computer systems firm registered the first .com Internet domain name. Although Symbolics.com didn’t spark an instant gold rush, the event planted the first seed of a transformation…

…American Life Project, a Washington think tank that studies the social impacts of the Internet. “It usually takes technologies a lot longer to insinuate themselves into the basic rhythms of people’s lives.”
But there was hardly a ripple when Symbolics Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of computer systems and software based on research done at MIT, signed up the first .com with Network Solutions, the domain registration firm that was acquired by VeriSign in 2000.
Symbolics founders who were contacted for this story didn’t even remember the event. The assets and intellectual property of the original publicly traded Symbolics Inc. have been taken over by a privately held firm of the same name. The Symbolics.com Web site still exists, but was purchased in 2009 by XF.com, an Internet domain investment firm.
In 1985, only six entities registered a .com, one of six top-level domain names created a year earlier in a reorganization of the early Internet’s naming bureaucracy. At the time, .cor (short for corporate)…

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25 years of .com domain names

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