March 15, 1985: Dot-Com Revolution Starts With a Whimper

(Originally published by the author in Wired, on this day in 2010)

1985: Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registers symbolics.com, the internet’s first domain name. The market for these unique addresses would not heat up for years, but this click heard ’round the world would eventually provide just about anyone a place in cyberspace to call their own.

Owning your own domain is nothing to brag about anymore, while trying to get one that resembles your name or something personally meaningful has become an exercise in futility. But a quarter of a century ago, when Symbolics took the first step, there was barely an Internet — it was years before the world wide web and graphical web browsers.

In those early days, even before AOL, the internet was a noncommercial medium that only eggheads and propellerheads used. It was more of a military and academic tool than today’s vast playground, time suck and, for some, golden goose now central to everyone’s waking moments.

Back in 1985, nobody thought to register, say, sex.com, the most expensive domain ever. It was bought from Network Solutions in 1994 and changed hands in 2006 for a reputed $14 million, and it goes on the auction block later this week to the highest bidder, starting at $1 million.

The entire cybersquatting era was a decade away, as was the rush to acquire a personal domain to customize and control e-mail and to make blogs memorable in name, if not in content.

Nobody seemed in a terrible hurry to get a domain; only five were registered in all of 1985. As you’d expect, the first 100 are packed with computer companies. Apple registered its namesake, the 64th domain, on Feb 19, 1987. Microsoft waited until 1991 to buy theirs.

IBM and Sun registered on the same March day in 1986, the same year Intel and AMD joined the cool crowd. That was 14 months ahead of even Cisco Systems, whose tag line in the future would be: “Empowering the Internet generation.”

No, none of these obvious suspects were first, or particularly early adopters. In fairness, Symbolics was not exactly chopped liver; it was a member of the legendary Route 128 corridor of high-tech firms that fueled the Massachusetts Miracle (no, not the election of Scott Brown). That remarkable stretch of economic power catapulted Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis into a dismal 1988 Democratic presidential candidacy, and then exile to obscurity — which is similar to Symbolics’ trajectory.

But the company’s place in history is well-deserved. Symbolics was conceived at the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, the renown academic incubator. One employee, a former member of the lab, created the LISP machine — the world’s first workstation, before that term was even invented.

Symbolics was best-known for developing what was thought at the time to be the best computing platform for developing AI software. This was during a lush, Darpa-funded renaissance for the sexy-sounding, yet broadly-defined technology. Others know Symbolics for its software, which, among other things, was used to create some scenes in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

By 1985 Symbolics was marketing its fifth-generation 3600 series of LISP workstations and, in a era bedazzled by the prospects for AI, was riding high. Things then turned south. Born between two AI winters, Symbolics went into a freefall: Founders were fired, buyers panicked, real estate investments turned bad and the inexorable march of the PC trampled it into near oblivion.

Symbolics still exists, but in a very diminished capacity — and at an entirely new (and less snazzy) address: symbolics-dks.com.

Last August, symbolics.com changed hands for the first time, bought by a domain-aggregation company whose owner was five years old when the address was first registered. The site now hosts the personal blog of Aron Meystedt, who owns both XF.com and his trophy domain.

Everyone and his sister now owns a domain, or has personalized space on someone else’s. Facebook alone has more than 400 million members, and each one of them can have a vanity address.

Even if you don’t have or share one, chances are you work somewhere with a storefront on the internet that has a “.com” after its name.

But on this day in 1985, very few people could make even that claim.

Source: Various

Photo: Symbolics LISP Machine, Google NY office computer museum