What was the first registered domain name?

The first registered domain name was symbolics.com. It was registered on March 15, 1985, by Symbolics, Inc., a Massachusetts computer company known for producing Lisp workstations and software. The registration occurred soon after the .com top-level domain was introduced for commercial organizations.

At the time, the Domain Name System was still new, and the web did not yet exist. The domain was mainly an Internet naming experiment connected to emerging network services, not a public website in the modern sense. Symbolics.com later became known as the oldest continuously registered .com domain.

People sometimes confuse the first domain name with the first website. The first registered domain predates the World Wide Web by several years: Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web in 1989, and the first website went online at CERN around 1991. Another common mistake is assuming that familiar early technology companies such as IBM, Apple, or Microsoft registered the first domain; none of those names came before Symbolics.com.