本文转载自WordPress啦！
是否知道第一个.com域名Symbolics.com？它是一个现已解散的马萨诸塞电脑制造商Symbolics在1985年3月15日所注册。
虽然世界第一个域名Nordu.net在那年的一月份就诞生了, symbolics.com却是几个月后第一个通过DNS过程而注册的域名。那时当然还没有万维网，不过互联网已诞生。实际上，当nordu.net创建 时，大约在美国国家科学基金(NSF)委托一所网速将近56千比特/秒的大学创建美国国家科学基金网（NSFNET）时，第一个基于的TCP/IP广域网 已运行了两年。在1985年，只有六家公司看好在根服务器上保留域名，Symbolics是第一家。(其它公司为： bbn.com、think.com、mcc.com、dec.com 和northrop.com)。
奇怪的是Symbolics公司注册Symbolics.com后，这将近25年以来一直没有将此域名转售，而就在最近XF.com Investments
投资公司却购买下此域名，收购金额尚未透露。
让我们来回顾下这个最早的.com域名的故主吧：
Symbolics, Inc是从麻省理工智能学院分离出来的一家电脑制造商，总部设在马萨诸塞州剑桥市后搬到Concord，设计和制造Lisp 机器
，该机器可用于实现Lisp的编程语言上的单用户计算机在线优化。第一次投入商业运营就启用了“通用计算机” 、“工作站” 这些叫法。 该公司在20世纪80、90年代提供了一流软件开发环境，就是现在惠普Alpha测试Tru64 UNIX的Open Genera。
在80年代后期，该公司业绩下滑至破产并逐渐被遗忘，其员工Dan Weinreb博客中有完整的记载 ：
世界变化太快了，超出了我们的掌控。新的“工作站”类型计算机出现: the Suns 、Apollos 等等。Lisp的新技术出现使得在传统硬件上也可以运行; 虽然没有我们的好，但是已能满足很多用途。因此，我们专门的Lisp构架急剧下滑。大量的Unix 软件涌现并可在Unix工作站运行: 所有的供应商不必再开放完整的软件组件。英特尔、摩托罗拉、IBM制造的CPU速度高，价格又便宜，Symbolics很难跟上节奏了。
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回到Symbolics，当时内部管理出现了很大的冲突，导致很多高层管理人员辞职。 而其他董事会成员和信任的CEO没有远见，无法预见和规划。此后，Symbolics公司还长期租约了一个新的办公地点和工厂，可惜没能实现预期的增长， 却又无法将这些过剩的办公空间转租出去以致于浪费了很多资金，不停地裁员。我们越来越觉得情况不妙，但是公司没有做出反应。
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Symbolics仍保留着原来的样子，但只是一个空壳了。现在第一个.com 域名竟成为小域名投资公司所有，真是有羞其身份。其网站上也没有公布任何与公司相关人员的名字，公司地址。现在除了XF.com公司打算明年庆祝其25岁 生日之外，没有任何迹象预示这个有着悠久历史的域名会有怎样的未来。 引用《指环王》中山姆的话: “我不知道为什么，但是它让我很伤心。”
附原文：
25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands
Did you know the first .com domain name that was ever registered was Symbolics.com
, on the 15th of March 1985 by the now defunct Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer Symbolics?
While the first that was created in January of that same year was Nordu.net (used to serve as the identifier of the first root server, nic.nordu.net), symbolics.com was the first domain name to actually be registered through the appropriate DNS process a few months later. This was of course long before there was a WWW, but you already had ‘the Internet’. In fact, the first TCP/IP-based wide-area network had already been operational for two years when nordu.net was created, right around the time the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the construction of the legendary NSFNET, a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone. Only six companies thought it’d be a good idea to reserve the domain name on the root servers in 1985 (the others were bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com and northrop.com). But Symbolics was first to make the move.
Remarkably, Symbolics.com hasn’t changed ownership once during the nearly 25 years that followed its initial registration. Marking an end to that era, domain name investment company XF.com Investments has just purchased the domain name for an undisclosed sum.
Which calls for a bit of history about the original owner:
Symbolics, Inc – a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab – was a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later in Concord, Massachusetts, that designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. The machines became the first commercially available “general-purpose computers” or “workstations” way before those terms were coined.
The company also offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s, now sold commercially as Open Genera for Tru64 UNIX on the HP Alpha.
In the late eighties, the company started its slow descent towards bankruptcy and oblivion, neatly chronicled in this blog post by former Symbolics employee Dan Weinreb:
The world changed out from under us very quickly. The new “workstation” category of computer appeared: the Suns and Apollos and so on. New technology for implementing Lisp was invented that allowed good Lisp implementations to run on conventional hardware; not quite as good as ours, but good enough for most purposes. So the real value-added of our special Lisp architecture was suddenly diminished. A large body of useful Unix software came to exist and was portable amongst the Unix workstations: no longer did each vendor have to develop a whole software suite. And the workstation vendors got to piggyback on the ever-faster, ever-cheaper CPU’s being made by Intel and Motorola and IBM, with whom it was hard for Symbolics to keep up. We at Symbolics were slow to acknowledge this. We believed our own “dogma” even as it became less true. It was embedded in our corporate culture. If you disputed it, your co-workers felt that you “just didn’t get it” and weren’t a member of the clan, so to speak. This stifled objective analysis. (This is a very easy problem to fall into — don’t let it happen to you!)
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Meanwhile, back at Symbolics, there were huge internal management conflicts, leading to the resignation of much of top management, who were replaced by the board of directors with new CEO’s who did not do a good job, and did not have the vision to see what was happening. Symbolics signed long-term leases on big new offices and a new factory, anticipating growth that did not come, and were unable to sublease the properties due to office-space gluts, which drained a great deal of money. There were rounds of layoffs. More and more of us realized what was going on, and that Symbolics was not reacting. Having created an object-oriented database system for Lisp called Statice, I left in 1988 with several co-workers to form Object Design, Inc., to make an object-oriented database system for the brand-new mainstream object-oriented language, C++.
Symbolics still exists as a shell of its former self. But now the very first .com domain name ever registered becomes property of a small domain name investment holding that is so shy about its identity that it doesn’t publish the names of the people involved with the company, let alone a company address, on its website. There’s absolutely no indication of what the future has in store for the historical domain name, apart from the fact XF.com intends to celebrate its 25th birthday next year.
To quote Samwise Gamgee in Lord Of The Rings: “I don’t know why, but it makes me sad.”