The first domain names ever registered

The story of the first .com domain, symbolics.com, registered on March 15, 1985, the first 10 .com names, and how domains went from free to worth millions.

On March 15, 1985, a computer company in Massachusetts called Symbolics registered symbolics.com. It was the first .com domain name ever. Nobody involved could have known they were starting something that would grow to hundreds of millions of names and create a whole new kind of property.

Before domain names

In the early 1980s, the internet's ancestor, ARPANET, connected a small number of research computers. Every computer's name and number was listed in a single shared file that had to be copied around by hand. As the network grew, that stopped working. In 1983, computer scientist Paul Mockapetris designed the Domain Name System (DNS), the system that still turns names like example.com into the numeric addresses computers use.

The first generic endings, including .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov and .mil, arrived in the mid-1980s. ".com" was meant for commercial companies, and for years almost nobody used it.

The first 10 .com domains ever registered

Big names followed quickly: ibm.com and sun.com on March 19, 1986, then intel.com and ti.com on March 25, 1986. In all of 1985, only six .com names were registered.

The story: from free to fortune

For its first decade, registering a domain was free, and the internet was mostly universities, government labs and tech companies. You couldn't just sign up and grab a name. You had to be connected to the research network.

Everything changed in the 1990s. The web arrived, the public came online, and businesses suddenly needed an address. In 1995, Network Solutions, which ran registrations at the time, began charging: $100 for two years, then $50 a year after that. That price tag turned domain names into something you could buy, hold and sell, and the first domain investors were born.

The people who understood what was happening registered simple words like Business, Hotels and Men while they were still available for the price of a registration. Within a few years, names bought for $100 were selling for millions. Business.com sold for $7.5 million in 1999, a world record at the time. Read about the people behind those deals in our domain legends page.

What happened to symbolics.com?

Symbolics the company faded away, but its domain lived on as a piece of internet history. In 2009, more than 20 years after it was first registered, the name was bought by a domain investment company and kept online as a tribute to its place as the first .com.

From 6 names to hundreds of millions

From six .com names in 1985, the count has grown to well over 150 million .com names, plus hundreds of millions more across every other ending. Today there are more than a thousand endings to choose from, from .ai to .shop. But the basic idea Paul Mockapetris designed in 1983 still works the same way every time you type an address.

What the first domains teach investors

• Short and simple lasts. Three-letter names like bbn.com, dec.com and sri.com are still prized.
• Early beats perfect. The first movers got the best names for almost nothing.
• Every new wave repeats the story. New endings and trends (like .ai) create new early movers today.

Want to start your own collection? Read what is domaining?

Sources

• Wikipedia: List of the oldest currently registered internet domain names
• Stanford CS: InterNIC and Network Solutions history