Well that's strange. The company was founded in 1976, so it was certainly plausible that they would be an early domain registration, but 1996 wouldn't qualify as that!
I wonder why you got a different date back?
If you do a whois, there is a:
created: 1985-01-01
string in the record (along with the 1996 date), so it's a bit confusing.
That 1985-01-01 is when .COM itself (TLD) was created.