Ever wonder what the oldest registered .com domain is on the Internet? After all, they haven't always existed. In fact, it was just 24 years ago this month that the oldest domain was registered. It was www.symbolics.com, owned by the Symbolics, Inc. company who, back in the day, was a leading software development firm with software projects designed back in the 1980s which appear very much like modern software designs seen today. For example, they had developed a fully object-oriented operating system called Genera, which today still exists as Open Genera, for Alpha CPUs. Their domain was registered on March 15, 1985 -- when the Internet was brand new.

Top 100 list, along with current Top 1 Million ranking:

Items in green denote current Top 500 ranking. According to Netcraft, there are currently over 216 million website names registered, with about 77 million sites being actively hosted. The rest are parked at their registrar (like GoDaddy).

Check out what www.apple.com looked like in 1997. And what www.intel.com looked like at the same time. Even www.sun.com from 1996 looks antiquated, and Sun Micrsosystems was one of the earliest companies to wholly embrace the web, even touting what has since become the idea of cloud computing back in the 1980s. It's for real folks, the web has changed. It was a completely different place back then.

It's interesting to note that when Apple launched its original integrated Macintosh computer in 1984, so named for a brand of Apple (McIntosh), the company did not yet have the www.apple.com domain. It would take another three years before they got that.

IBM Corporation, founded somewhere between the 1880s and 1924 depending on what even you actually consider to have been a foundational movement (most accept 1896), and the inventor of the original IBM PC computer with an Intel 8088 or 8086 16-bit CPU (limited to 1 MB of memory and 4.77 MHz clock) that had been on sale since the early 1980s, did not get its www.ibm.com domain until 1986, some 90+ years after first coming into existence.

It may be interesting to note that IBM's earliest devices were mechanical tabulators using the Hollerith system for storing signed numbers on fixed-positional punched cards back when the company was called the Tabulating Machine Company (TMC building, 1893 picture). The tabulation equipment was developed by Herman Hollerith to improve efficiency in processing census data every 10 years. After being called TMC since 1896, in 1911 a company called Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) was formed as a three-way merger of TMC, International Time Recording Company and Computing Scale Corporation. And on February 14, 1924, CTR officially changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Their most advanced tabulating equipment was used during World War II to keep track of holocaust victims, as well as for other Nazi uses.

Many of the domain names appearing on this list have since been moved to other sites. As such, many of them are still in existence, albeit under new identities. The list above shows only those in the Top 1 Million List updated daily by www.alexa.com with the same name today.

www.intel.com comes in at 1018 today, while www.amd.com comes in at 2001. www.sun.com (Sun Microsystems) was the 12th domain registered, just after www.ibm.com, and it is currently in the Top 500 at #484. www.hp.com beats them all as the 9th domain registered, and it sits today at #191.

The tops today are www.adobe.com at #56 and www.apple.com at #66.