Massachusetts computer manufacturer registers first domain name on the Internet – it will go bankrupt soon

When the Internet had not yet arrived in Italy, and when the world wide web was a confused idea in the mind of its inventor, the first domain name was registered. The first address where to install a site. It was March 15, 1985, the most popular operating system was MS-DOS 3.0, the best-selling personal computer the Tandy 1000, and the first Dell “Turbo Pc” and the Commodore Amiga 1000 were about to debut.

In short, it was the prehistory of the Internet and symbolics.com was registered in the United States: it was registered by a computer manufacturer of the same name based in Massachusetts. Why had he done it? Probably because the American National Science Foundation had given the task of creating the backbone of the network (at 56 kilobits per second) that would connect universities and advanced research centers with five supercomputers created just that year. It was called Nsfnet and went down in history as the partnership that changed the world: before the birth of Internet Service Providers, this was the way to access the Internet in the United States. In short, construction of the network had begun but in 1985 only six companies realized that it might be a good idea to register their domain name: the others were bb.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com and northrop.com. But the first was in fact Symbolics even if this prescient move will not prevent him from bankruptcy (today the domain is kept alive by a professional who buys and sells Internet domains). It is interesting to note that fifty-four domain names were registered in 1986 including that of HP, IBM, Intel, Boeing, Siemens and Adobe; the following year it was the turn of Cisco, Lockheed, Dupont, Philips and Apple. Microsoft will only have its domain name in 1991. Today there are more than 360 million domain names of various types.