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The World’s Oldest Dot-Com Turns 30

Mar 13, 2015  •  Post A Comment

The first dot-com turns 30 this weekend, with CNN reporting that the company’s purchase of the world’s oldest dot-com domain, symbolics.com, predates the World Wide Web by four years.

The Massachusetts-based computer company Symbolics bought the domain on March 15, 1985.

“Symbolics was one of the original makers of computer workstations, and the company even got a mention in the movie ‘Jurassic Park.’ But the ‘Lisp’ computer language that Symbolics developed eventually faded in popularity. Symbolics went belly-up and filed for bankruptcy in 1993,” CNN reports.

Both the company and the symbolics.com website still exist today, with the company maintaining the Lisp operating system that continues in limited use by some companies and government agencies, the report notes.

Symbolics sold the symbolics.com address in 2009 to entrepreneur Aron Meystedt, and the company moved its own site to symbolics-dks.com.

Meystedt has reportedly turned symbolics.com into “a kind of Internet history archive. A cartoonish city on the homepage reveals fast facts about the Internet and Worldwide Web when you click on buildings’ windows,” CNN reports.

Email and the Internet also predate the World Wide Web, the CNN story notes.

symbolics.com logo

3 Comments

  1. I find it very ironic that when I tried to go there the page timed out.

  2. @Crabapplejimmy it takes a long time to go back to 1985!

  3. Symbolics didn’t buy that domain name. It was acquired during those simpler times, when all domain names were free.

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