The first domain name registered was Symbolics.com. It was registered March 15, 1985, to Symbolics Inc., a computer systems company in Cambridge, making it the first .com-domain in the world. In August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments. It was a company best-known for developing a computer language called “Lisp,” and even went public at one point.

The original Symbolics company pioneered computer development. Symbolics designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. The Lisp Machine was the first commercially available “workstation” (although that word had not yet been coined). Symbolics also made significant advances in software technology, and offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, Symbolics.com remains the first, and oldest, registered domain name out of approximately 275,000,000 domain names in existence. Of these 275 million domain names, approximately 120 million are of the .com extension. VeriSign reports that between 25 million and 30 million new domains are registered each year. There is a 72% – 75% renewal rate among .com domains – so approximately 3/4 of new registrations are renewed the following year. VeriSign reports that 87% of .com domains resolve to an active website (13% are inactive).

Additionally, it is the first and oldest .com domain in existence.