What is the oldest three letter .com domain? BBN.com.
Registered on April 24, 1985, BBN.com was also the 2nd registered .com, after Symbolics.com.
BBN.com was registered to Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., a research and development company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company became known as BBN Technologies, and in 2009 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon corporation.
So how is BBN.com being used today?
One would expect some type of historic relic content, or at least references to the early days of BBN Technologies. Surely, the company’s feat of having registered the 1st three letter (LLL) .com domain would be mentioned!
Alas, none of the above.
The domain BBN.com forwards to RaytheonIntelligenceAndSpace.com – a four word, 28-letter domain registered in 2020!
That’s right. A short, valuable LLL .com is “expanded” into 28 letters, what an irony.
But wait, it gets even better.
Mother company, Raytheon, points its Raytheon.com to … RTX.com. This LLL .com was most likely acquired earlier in 2020 as well, as Raytheon joined forces with United Technologies in a multi-billion dollar merger.
There are no recorded sales for RTX.com, that belonged to a company called Real Time eXecutives.
What an irony! Anyway, shorter domain are obviously more memorizable, but it is equally important to register the company’s name in the mind of its customers so it kinda makes sense.