In the beginning, there was one woman and a telephone.
From 1985 until the early 1990s, if you wanted a .com, you sent an email to hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa or you simply called Joyce K. Reynolds at SRI International in California. Joyce, working alongside Internet pioneer Jon Postel, personally approved and typed every single entry into the master list. No website, no shopping cart, no credit card; just a quick note or a chat, and the domain was yours for exactly zero dollars.
On 15 March 1985, a tiny Lisp-computer company named Symbolics became the first: symbolics.com. A month later, the defense-research giant BBN took bbn.com. That spring and summer, think.com, dec.com, xerox.com, hp.com, and northrop.com followed in rapid succession. IBM grabbed ibm.com in March 1986, Sun Microsystems took sun.com the very next day, Intel followed a week later, and Apple (surprisingly late) finally claimed apple.com in February 1987. By the end of 1985 only six .coms existed. By the end of the decade there were fewer than four hundred in the entire world.
Those sleepy registrations are now among the most valuable assets on earth. The humble two- and three-letter domains that companies casually picked up for free routinely change hands today for eight and nine figures. A knowledgeable broker in 2025 would quietly quote hp.com north of two hundred million dollars, intel.com closer to half a billion, and apple.com somewhere in the “call me when you’re serious” range that starts with a one and has nine zeros after it. Even the very first, symbolics.com, would fetch eight figures purely for its place in history.
Everything changed on 14 September 1995, when Network Solutions, now the sole official registrar, started charging fifty dollars a year. That single decision turned a free Defense Department utility into one of the greatest accidental windfalls in commercial history.
Today, more than 162 million .com domains are registered, and the aftermarket for the earliest ones has become a hushed, ultra-high-end corner of finance. Yet every one of those multimillion-dollar assets began the same way: a short email or a friendly phone call to Joyce Reynolds, who typed the line herself and hit save.