By Danilo Vicente*
This week, the first domain registration on the internet completed 38 years. On March 15, 1985, a computer and workstation manufacturer registered Symbolics.com. It was still the beginning of the World Wide Web, back then it was a military and academic tool.
The history of Symbolics and the still active address it’s curious. The Symbolics Computer Corporation, from Massachusetts, in the United States, decided to innovate and create the “Lisp” computer language. It wasn’t very successful. However, in the wave of innovation, it registered the . At that time there was no commercial character on the web and access to addresses, restricted, was with large numbers.
The registry started more as an attempt to facilitate access and to have something that could be relevant in the future, but there were years with little “competition”. Demand for records has been low for years. Himself today it lists some of the top 100, such as “think.com”, “sun.com” and “apple.com”, all created between 1985 and 1987.
Symbolics filed for bankruptcy in 1993, a lawsuit finalized in 1996. The domain remained dormant until 2009, when investor Aron Meystedt acquired it. Today, active, the page is a kind of tribute to the internet, and, in addition to examples of addresses registered in the early days, it has a timeline that indicates historical facts related to the web. It’s worth playing, it’s interesting.
In a description on the site, Meystedt defines himself as a startup enthusiast and “fanatic” for website names, which he considers “original NFTs — only with a clear use case and global demand from end users”.
Just don’t register. I tried and “bugged” my access to the page. After hours it returned to normal.
Currently, there are about 350 million registered domains, of which 160.9 million are “.com”.
In Brazil, the “.br” domain began on April 18, 1989, when Jon Postel, creator of IANA (The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), delegated termination to the group that operated academic networks in the country. However, it was only in 1991 that the first subdivision of “.br” was established with the subdomains org.br, gov.br, com.br, net.br and mil.br. Since 1995, Registro.br has been the domain name registration executor, within the Internet Management Committee in Brazil.
*Danilo Vicente is managing partner of Loures Comunicação