dotCOM turns 25
On March 14, 1985, if one wanted to visit a commercial company’s Web site, he needed to know the string of numbers which made up its IP address. But a day later that changed.
On March 15, 1985, a small Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc. registered Symbolics.com. It would be more than a month before the second dot-com was registered, and there wouldn’t be 100 registered dot-com’s until November 30, 1987. The symbolics.com address is still in use today but was sold to a domain trading firm last year.
Six top-level domains were officially created in January 1985 (.com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org), though it appears Symbolic was the first to register any of these. Other early adopters included Xerox, HP, IBM, Sun and AT&T, all of which were among the first 15 .com registrations - none of them registered until the 1990s.
It took until late 1987 before the 100th .com address was registered. Today, an estimated 80 million .com names are in use, of which 99.9 percent have been registered. There are 668,000 dot-com’s registered every month, according to the BBC.
Courtesy: www.pcworld.com, www.hideipology.com