The First .COM

Today's post was almost going to be about the Ides of March, but in researching that date, I happened upon an interesting bit of internet history. The very first commercial internet domain name was registered on March 15, 1985 - symbolics.com. The company that registered it, Symbolics, Inc. is no longer in business and the domain was transferred to XF.com in 2009. While symbolics.com was the first domain ever registered, the very first one to be created was Nordu.net, which served as the identifier of the first root server, nic.nordu.net. Nordu.net was created just three months before symbolics.com was registered through the normal domain registration process. TechCrunch has a fascinating article about this history as well as the current status of symbolics.com. Today, this domain exists as a mere marker of its history, although the owner has posted some interesting information about his personal role in acquiring symbolics.com. He has also created an enlightening infographic depicting internet trivia and statistics. Alas, everything has its day and then must pass gracefully into the aether.