1
00:00:00,240 --> 00:00:03,200
Speaker 1: The Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

2
00:00:08,600 --> 00:00:12,160
Speaker 1: Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a

3
00:00:12,280 --> 00:00:16,319
Speaker 1: show that decodes history one day at a time. I'm

4
00:00:16,360 --> 00:00:19,800
Speaker 1: Gay Bluesier and in this episode we're talking about the

5
00:00:19,880 --> 00:00:28,960
Speaker 1: first company to stake its claim in cyberspace. The day

6
00:00:29,320 --> 00:00:34,760
Speaker 1: was March fifteenth, nineteen eighty five. The first dot com

7
00:00:34,800 --> 00:00:39,680
Speaker 1: domain name was registered by Symbolics, Inc. A Massachusetts based

8
00:00:39,760 --> 00:00:43,720
Speaker 1: computer company. At the time, the Internet was not yet

9
00:00:43,760 --> 00:00:46,960
Speaker 1: a commercial medium and existed mostly as a tool for

10
00:00:47,120 --> 00:00:52,240
Speaker 1: military officials and academic researchers. The Worldwide Web and its

11
00:00:52,360 --> 00:00:56,600
Speaker 1: user friendly browsers were still years away, but the early

12
00:00:56,640 --> 00:01:00,240
Speaker 1: networks users still needed a way to easily identify and

13
00:01:00,400 --> 00:01:06,000
Speaker 1: access Internet resources, including computer host files, and services like email.

14
00:01:06,720 --> 00:01:10,840
Speaker 1: Rather than memorizing the numerical address for each of those assets,

15
00:01:11,200 --> 00:01:15,600
Speaker 1: users began assigning simple text based labels, an early version

16
00:01:15,720 --> 00:01:19,760
Speaker 1: of domain names. As more and more computers joined the

17
00:01:19,800 --> 00:01:24,520
Speaker 1: fledgling network, it became impossible to maintain a centrally organized

18
00:01:24,600 --> 00:01:29,120
Speaker 1: registry of all their numerical addresses. To solve the problem,

19
00:01:29,400 --> 00:01:33,720
Speaker 1: the Domain Name system, or DNS was introduced by the

20
00:01:33,760 --> 00:01:38,760
Speaker 1: Internet Engineering Task Force. The first domain created after the

21
00:01:38,800 --> 00:01:43,200
Speaker 1: system's introduction was nordou dot net. It belonged to a

22
00:01:43,280 --> 00:01:48,280
Speaker 1: Scandinavian research group and was established on January first, nineteen

23
00:01:48,320 --> 00:01:53,440
Speaker 1: eighty five. However, the researchers didn't bother paying to register

24
00:01:53,520 --> 00:01:57,200
Speaker 1: their domain name through the DNS process. As a result,

25
00:01:57,480 --> 00:02:01,720
Speaker 1: symbolics dot com became the first official domain name when

26
00:02:01,720 --> 00:02:05,000
Speaker 1: it was registered a few months later. The company was

27
00:02:05,040 --> 00:02:08,000
Speaker 1: ahead of the curve in that regard, claiming the domain

28
00:02:08,120 --> 00:02:11,280
Speaker 1: name for a commercial website at a time when barely

29
00:02:11,320 --> 00:02:15,160
Speaker 1: anyone had the ability to see it. Symbolics was a

30
00:02:15,200 --> 00:02:20,200
Speaker 1: computer systems company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was best

31
00:02:20,240 --> 00:02:25,080
Speaker 1: known for designing and manufacturing Lisp machines, the first commercially

32
00:02:25,080 --> 00:02:31,040
Speaker 1: available general purpose computers. They were essentially the world's first workstations,

33
00:02:31,080 --> 00:02:34,919
Speaker 1: invented before that term was even in use. The name

34
00:02:35,120 --> 00:02:39,680
Speaker 1: Lisp derives from Lisp processor and refers to a family

35
00:02:39,720 --> 00:02:42,600
Speaker 1: of programming languages that date all the way back to

36
00:02:42,800 --> 00:02:48,000
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty Symbolics Lisp machines were optimized to run the

37
00:02:48,080 --> 00:02:51,120
Speaker 1: Lisp programming language and were put to use in all

38
00:02:51,240 --> 00:02:56,120
Speaker 1: kinds of fields, including AI applications, medical image processing, and

39
00:02:56,200 --> 00:02:59,760
Speaker 1: computer graphics, just to name a few. The company was

40
00:03:00,040 --> 00:03:03,560
Speaker 1: also known for the operating system and development environment that

41
00:03:03,639 --> 00:03:08,200
Speaker 1: it created to run on those workstations. It was called Genera,

42
00:03:08,240 --> 00:03:11,880
Speaker 1: and its software was used to create animations and graphics

43
00:03:11,919 --> 00:03:15,800
Speaker 1: and affects heavy entertainment projects, including the movie version of

44
00:03:15,840 --> 00:03:19,480
Speaker 1: The Jetsons and Star Trek three The Search for Spock.

45
00:03:20,200 --> 00:03:23,000
Speaker 1: The company was such a leading name in the industry

46
00:03:23,160 --> 00:03:25,720
Speaker 1: that it even got a shout out in Michael Creighton's

47
00:03:25,800 --> 00:03:31,080
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety novel Jurassic Park. The film adaptation doesn't reference

48
00:03:31,120 --> 00:03:34,320
Speaker 1: Symbolics by name, but it does imply that one of

49
00:03:34,320 --> 00:03:37,960
Speaker 1: the characters may be a contractor for the company. An

50
00:03:37,960 --> 00:03:41,960
Speaker 1: hour into the movie, computer programmer Dennis Nedrie turns off

51
00:03:41,960 --> 00:03:44,880
Speaker 1: the park security system so he can steal some dinosaur

52
00:03:44,960 --> 00:03:48,680
Speaker 1: embryos unseen. Later on, when no one can fix what

53
00:03:48,760 --> 00:03:51,800
Speaker 1: he did, the park's owner tells the chief engineer to

54
00:03:52,080 --> 00:03:58,000
Speaker 1: quote call Nedrie's people in Cambridge. Despite their contributions to

55
00:03:58,040 --> 00:04:01,760
Speaker 1: the tech sector and to sci fi pop culture, Symbolics,

56
00:04:01,840 --> 00:04:07,200
Speaker 1: LISP workstations, and Genera software eventually lost their luster. By

57
00:04:07,200 --> 00:04:10,320
Speaker 1: the early nineties, the rise of the PC was complete,

58
00:04:10,480 --> 00:04:14,480
Speaker 1: and Symbolics, once innovative products, began to look less special

59
00:04:14,560 --> 00:04:19,800
Speaker 1: by the minute. According to former Symbolics employee Dan winreb quote,

60
00:04:20,080 --> 00:04:23,560
Speaker 1: the world changed out from under us very quickly. New

61
00:04:23,600 --> 00:04:28,080
Speaker 1: technology was invented that allowed good Lisp implementations to run

62
00:04:28,120 --> 00:04:31,560
Speaker 1: on conventional hardware, not quite as good as ours, but

63
00:04:31,680 --> 00:04:36,280
Speaker 1: good enough for most purposes. Meanwhile, Symbolics signed long term

64
00:04:36,360 --> 00:04:40,200
Speaker 1: leases on big new offices and a new factory, anticipating

65
00:04:40,240 --> 00:04:44,240
Speaker 1: growth that did not come. The company wound up filing

66
00:04:44,240 --> 00:04:47,840
Speaker 1: for bankruptcy in nineteen ninety three, but instead of closing

67
00:04:47,920 --> 00:04:51,640
Speaker 1: up shop, it continued on under private ownership. In fact,

68
00:04:51,720 --> 00:04:55,320
Speaker 1: the company still around today and its products are still

69
00:04:55,480 --> 00:04:59,240
Speaker 1: used by certain companies and government agencies. As for the

70
00:04:59,240 --> 00:05:03,240
Speaker 1: company's web site, symbolics dot com, it remained up and

71
00:05:03,320 --> 00:05:06,520
Speaker 1: running for decades, though there wasn't much to do on it.

72
00:05:07,160 --> 00:05:10,039
Speaker 1: That finally changed in two thousand and nine when the

73
00:05:10,080 --> 00:05:15,160
Speaker 1: owner of Symbolics was contacted by an entrepreneur named Aaron Maystead.

74
00:05:15,880 --> 00:05:19,520
Speaker 1: He ran a domain name registry business called xf dot

75
00:05:19,520 --> 00:05:23,000
Speaker 1: Com Investments and had noticed that the oldest domain on

76
00:05:23,080 --> 00:05:27,600
Speaker 1: record seemed to be inactive. Mastead liked the idea of

77
00:05:27,640 --> 00:05:31,279
Speaker 1: owning such a historic domain, so he made an unsolicited

78
00:05:31,320 --> 00:05:34,080
Speaker 1: call to see if it was for sale. It turned

79
00:05:34,080 --> 00:05:36,479
Speaker 1: out that it was, or at least it could be.

80
00:05:37,279 --> 00:05:40,800
Speaker 1: Later that year, Mastead purchased symbolics dot com for an

81
00:05:40,880 --> 00:05:44,839
Speaker 1: undisclosed amount, at which point the Symbolics company moved its

82
00:05:44,880 --> 00:05:49,680
Speaker 1: site to a new address, symbolics dash DKs dot com.

83
00:05:50,320 --> 00:05:52,919
Speaker 1: It didn't take long for Mastead to realize what a

84
00:05:53,000 --> 00:05:57,000
Speaker 1: smart investment he'd made. That's because symbolics dot com got

85
00:05:57,080 --> 00:06:02,000
Speaker 1: consistent traffic without any advertising. Hundreds and sometimes even thousands

86
00:06:02,040 --> 00:06:04,800
Speaker 1: of people would visit the nearly empty site each day,

87
00:06:05,120 --> 00:06:09,040
Speaker 1: amounting to hundreds of thousands of visits each year. Most

88
00:06:09,040 --> 00:06:12,200
Speaker 1: people checked out the site out of curiosity after learning

89
00:06:12,240 --> 00:06:15,240
Speaker 1: about its status as the first dot com, either from

90
00:06:15,279 --> 00:06:20,800
Speaker 1: an article, video, or podcast. Maystead decided to capitalize on

91
00:06:20,880 --> 00:06:24,200
Speaker 1: that curiosity by turning the site into a museum of

92
00:06:24,320 --> 00:06:29,240
Speaker 1: Internet history, which it still is today. When Symbolics registered

93
00:06:29,240 --> 00:06:32,440
Speaker 1: its dot com way back in nineteen eighty five, there

94
00:06:32,520 --> 00:06:36,080
Speaker 1: was barely a market for Internet addresses, and barely an

95
00:06:36,080 --> 00:06:39,640
Speaker 1: Internet for that matter. As a result, there wasn't much

96
00:06:39,680 --> 00:06:42,760
Speaker 1: of a rush to buy one. In fact, only five

97
00:06:42,839 --> 00:06:46,279
Speaker 1: others were registered that first year. A lot of the

98
00:06:46,320 --> 00:06:49,600
Speaker 1: heavy hitter computer companies were slower to join the party.

99
00:06:50,040 --> 00:06:54,080
Speaker 1: For example, Apple didn't register its domain name until nineteen

100
00:06:54,120 --> 00:06:58,120
Speaker 1: eighty seven, and Microsoft waited until nineteen ninety one to

101
00:06:58,200 --> 00:07:02,599
Speaker 1: buy theirs. By the following year, fewer than fifteen thousand

102
00:07:02,640 --> 00:07:05,760
Speaker 1: dot com domains had been registered, but it wouldn't be

103
00:07:05,839 --> 00:07:10,120
Speaker 1: much longer until the floodgates were open. Fast forward to today,

104
00:07:10,400 --> 00:07:13,720
Speaker 1: and there are roughly three hundred and fifty million domain

105
00:07:13,800 --> 00:07:17,400
Speaker 1: names in existence. Owning your own dot com is no

106
00:07:17,520 --> 00:07:20,720
Speaker 1: longer the claim to fame that it once was, unless,

107
00:07:20,720 --> 00:07:25,360
Speaker 1: of course, you happen to own the first one. I'm

108
00:07:25,400 --> 00:07:28,680
Speaker 1: Gabe Lousier and hopefully you now know a little more

109
00:07:28,720 --> 00:07:32,800
Speaker 1: about history today than you did yesterday. You can learn

110
00:07:32,880 --> 00:07:36,480
Speaker 1: even more about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook,

111
00:07:36,480 --> 00:07:41,040
Speaker 1: and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have

112
00:07:41,080 --> 00:07:43,880
Speaker 1: any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my

113
00:07:43,960 --> 00:07:48,160
Speaker 1: way at this day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to

114
00:07:48,280 --> 00:07:50,720
Speaker 1: Chandler May's for producing the show, and thanks to you

115
00:07:50,760 --> 00:07:53,920
Speaker 1: for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow for

116
00:07:54,040 --> 00:08:00,120
Speaker 1: another day in History. Class t