World's Oldest Dot-Com Symbolics Celebrates 30 Years Of The Interwebs

The world's first-ever dot-com celebrates its thirtieth birthday tomorrow, and to celebrate, it's gone offline! To be fair, that could be due to the fact that it's getting inundated with traffic, given everyone and their dog seems to be curious about what the oldest Web domain looks like.

If you are able to access it, at http://www.symbolics.com/, what you'll find is a cutesy town that acts as a bit of a Web archive. Meanwhile, the company that originally owned the domain has moved to symbolics-dks.com, where it looks the exact same as it has for many years.

Symbolic.com's old look

The story of the original domain is interesting, and not just because it's kind of symbolic for being the first one ever. Symbolics was a company that created workstations that revolved around the Lisp programming language, but ultimately, the company went under in 1993. Later, it was revived, and in 2009, it got a call from Aron Meystedt, a professional domain seller. He offered to buy the domain, and as the company was looking for immediate funding, it came at a good time. Aron then walked away with perhaps one of the coolest domain names ever.

Symbolic.com's current look

After Aron purchased it, he noticed the domain got hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of hits each day. Seeing an opportunity for revenue, he built the site we see today (or don't see, as it's still down as of the time of writing). Still, it's very cool to know that the original domain is still alive and kicking, even if it's gone through a transformation since its 1985 birth.