Aron Meystedt and XF.com made news in 2009, when Symbolics.com which belonged to a computer manufacturer, changed owners.
In 25 years of being registered, the domain never expired and it has never changed owners.
That is, until late 2009 when the acquisition by XF investments made news all over the internet and in the mainstream media.
If you visit Sybmolics.com today, a countdown clock appears at the top of web site. The latest blog entry was written on March 1st, 2010 and discusses one of Aron’s other ventures TrafficEstimate.com which was relaunched.
What’s in store for the Anniversary?
Whatever is in store for Symbolics.com in less than a day, Aron has promised a Big 25th Anniversary.
News has been trickling out by a variety of news sources celebrating the 25 year anniversary, but not much news has been put out by Aron in the last couple weeks. If you’re anxiously awaiting the anniversary, you have have less than 24 hours to go.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY, the Internet opened the door to business, and the world changed. Previously reserved for its academic and government users, the national computer network issued the first commercial domain name, symbolics.com, to a now-defunct computer company
….Barrons
Monday will see the 25th anniversary of the registration of the domain name Symbolics.com. Granted, it’s not particularly catchy, and to this day it’s renowned for nothing other than being the first. But it unwittingly became the eldest brother of a phenomenon that profoundly changed the world.
It’s not clear exactly what prompted a Massachussetts software company to contact the US Department of Defence – which was, at that time, responsible for administering the internet – and ask for it.
It certainly couldn’t have had any idea of the revolution that was to come – indeed, the world wide web was still more than five years away, and the internet was merely a network of computers used primarily for research purposes.
But Symbolics.com predated every other domain that we now type every day to shop, communicate, learn, entertain ourselves – even find partners
Years ago, I asked Marc Andreessen, creator of the first web browser, what surprised him most about the dot-com forces he helped unleash. “eBay,” he said without hesitation. “Who knew there was that much crap in people’s garages to sell?”
Personally, I’m a little more amazed at a site like Belch.com, “the largest collection of digitally recorded belches on the Net.” But maybe that’s just me.
It’s pretty mind-blowing that the dot-com domain is 25 years old. On March 15, 1985, a Cambridge, Mass., computer maker called Symbolics registered symbolics.com: the very first dot-com site. (That company, in its original form, died in the mid-1990s, and symbolics.com is now an odd blog about web sites.)