RMS: 1, Symbolics: 0

Symbolics probably doesn't mean much to you, but it should. It was the main reason that Richard Stallman started the GNU project.

You can read the full story in Rebel Code - or, if by some mischance, you don't have the book to hand, in this speech by RMS. But to summarise an extremely complex tale, at first, Stallman fought Symbolics directly by matching their (proprietary) code with his own, which he gave to a rival; but later he realised that this was not really a sensible way of helping people to use and share software freely:

Once I stopped punishing Symbolics, I had to figure out what to do next. I had to make a free operating system, that was clear — the only way that people could work together and share was with a free operating system.

At first, I thought of making a Lisp-based system, but I realized that wouldn't be a good idea technically. To have something like the Lisp machine system, you needed special purpose microcode. That's what made it possible to run programs as fast as other computers would run their programs and still get the benefit of typechecking. Without that, you would be reduced to something like the Lisp compilers for other machines. The programs would be faster, but unstable. Now that's okay if you're running one program on a timesharing system — if one program crashes, that's not a disaster, that's something your program occasionally does. But that didn't make it good for writing the operating system in, so I rejected the idea of making a system like the Lisp machine.

I decided instead to make a Unix-like operating system that would have Lisp implementations to run as user programs. The kernel wouldn't be written in Lisp, but we'd have Lisp.

As well as provoking the creation of the free software movement, Symbolics has another claim to fame: it was the first registered domain name. Amazingly, only now is that name leaving its original owner:

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.

It's pretty extraordinary how all these trailblazing events were tied up together back then; pretty strange, too, how distant they all seem. And, of course, good for the world that ultimately it was RMS that won.

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Stallman's Symbolic Victory

Slashdot points to an interesting list of first 100 registered domains. But I doubt whether even the most deep-dyed supporter of free software realises that it was the company behind the very first domain - Symbolics.com - that ultimately led to Richard Stallman to start his GNU project.

Symbolics was in competition with a company called LMI - Lisp Machine Incorporated - set up by a friend of Stallman. As its name implies, it was in the business of making computers running the Lisp programming language, as was Symbolics.

Unfortunately, Symbolics had most of the top LISP programmers, having recruited all Stallman's fellow hackers at MIT's AI Lab, and thereby destroying its community. All, that is, apart from Stallman, who set about single-handedly matching the work of Symbolics and its entire team of coders. This is what he told me for my book Rebel Code in 1999:

Looking back, Stallman says that this period beginning March 1982 saw "absolutely" the most intense coding he had ever done; it probably represents one of the most sustained bouts of one-person programming in history.

"In some ways it was very comfortable because I was doing almost nothing else," he says, "and I would go to sleep whenever I felt sleepy; when I woke up I would go back to coding; and when I felt sleepy again I'd go to sleep again. I had nothing like a daily schedule. I'd sleep probably for a few hours one and a half times a day, and it was wonderful; I felt more awake than I've ever felt. And I got a tremendous amount of work done [and] I did it tremendously efficiently." Although "it was exhilarating sometimes, sometimes it was terribly wearying. It was in some ways terribly lonesome, but I kept doing it [and] I wouldn't let anything stop me," he says."

His eventual failure to match Symbolics' work, which included a completely new system, proved a blessing disguise:

"I decided I didn't want to just continue punishing Symbolics forever. They destroyed my community; now I [wanted] to build something to replace it," he says. "I decided I would develop a free operating system, and in this way lay the foundation for a new community like the one that had been wiped out."

The rest, as they say, is history.

Something's Rotten in the Domain Name System

Although I can't quite claim to go back to the very first commercial domain, I do remember the Wired story about how many major US corporations had neglected to register relevant domains. And I also remember how around $7.5 million was paid for the utterly generic and pointless business.com domain.

So I've seen a thing or two. And yet I can still be disgusted by the depths to which the scammers can sink when it comes to domain names. Try this, for example: a company that seems to be magically reserving domain names shortly after people have entered them as a Whois search - only to dump it if it doesn't pull in any traffic.

It's this kind of parasitical business model that is pushing the domain name system close to breakdown, and making the Internet far less efficient than it could be.