Today almost every company, brand and even person you can think of has a ".com" address. But this extension has a "first" too, and that first was neither a search engine nor a shopping site. The world's first .com domain, symbolics.com, was registered on March 15, 1985, and its owner was a computer company whose name few people remember today.
What was the internet like before domain names?
Before the Domain Name System (DNS), computers on the network found each other through a shared list file that everyone held. As the network grew and that method became hard to manage, the hierarchical system we use today was designed, and extensions like .com, .org and .edu appeared.
According to Wikipedia, the .com extension was put into service on January 1, 1985. Its name comes from the word "commercial". The extension was ready, but nobody was in a hurry. It took two and a half months to wait for the first registration.
Who was Symbolics?
Symbolics was a company founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, born out of MIT's artificial intelligence lab. It made "Lisp machines" designed specially for the Lisp programming language. In other words, a firm making the favorite workstations of 1980s AI researchers.
It's not really surprising that such a company took the first .com. In those years the internet was largely a small world made up of universities, research labs and the technology companies that worked with them. Symbolics was right inside that world. Getting a domain name was then not a marketing move but a technical step to be properly addressable on the network.
The full .com list of 1985
Looking at the list of the oldest domain names still registered today, it's clear how quiet 1985 was. Only six .coms registered that year have survived to this day:
- symbolics.com (March 15, 1985)
- bbn.com (April 24, 1985)
- think.com (May 24, 1985)
- mcc.com (July 11, 1985)
- dec.com (September 30, 1985)
- northrop.com (November 7, 1985)
There is a small but important note here: this list shows the oldest domain names still registered today. There may have been other addresses registered in 1985 and later dropped, so instead of saying "six .coms were registered in total that year," it's more accurate to say "six remain today." BBN on the list is also the company that went down in history as the one where the first email was sent.
Then and now
Symbolics itself shrank over time, but the domain name lived on. symbolics.com was bought in 2009 by a domain investment company called XF.com Investments. The sale price wasn't made public, so figures circulating on the internet should be treated with caution.
| 1985 | 2026 |
|---|---|
| The first .com: on March 15, a single company | 166.6 million .com registrations (June 2026) |
| 1985 registrations remaining today: 6 | 401.6 million domain names across all extensions |
| Registration was free | Paid annually, through intermediary companies |
| Users: researchers, engineers | Users: nearly everyone |
According to Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief, the number of .com domain names reached 166.6 million as of June 30, 2026. Counting all extensions together, there are 401.6 million registrations in total. In other words, the list that began 41 years ago with a single Lisp machine maker has grown into one of the most crowded address books in the world.
What we like most about this story is that the first owner of the .com extension, now considered one of the most valuable real estate on the internet, took it not as an investment but just to make its work easier. Nobody that day guessed that one-word addresses would change hands for millions of dollars.
If you had been around in 1985, which .com address would you have grabbed first?