March 15, 2010, is the 25th anniversary of the first .com name registration. Symbolics Computers of Cambridge, MA registered the first Internet address ending in dot com symbolics.com in 1985. The website Geekosystem says symbolics.com was launched by the computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., which was a spin-off from MIT’s AI Lab.
The company went bankrupt in the mid-’90s (but not before their graphics division helped animate the orca in Free Willy), and was sold in 2009 to a domain name investment company, XF Investments.
Mark McLaughlin, CEO of Verisign, told BBC News, “This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the Internet, and .com is a good, well-known placeholder for the rest of the Internet.”
The BBC article says it is unlikely that the early dot com’s were thought of as businesses as the early internet was not seen as a place for commerce but rather as a platform for governmental and educational bodies to trade ideas. It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth .com was registered.
“Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event,” McLaughlin said, “with 668,000 dot com sites registered every month, they have become part of the fabric of our lives.”
An estimated 1.7 billion people – one-quarter of the world’s population – now use the internet. Verisign’s McLaughlin only sees that figure growing over the next quarter of a century. “I think that the way we access information today, mostly still through PCs and laptops is highly likely to change; that the voice will be more important than text input.” He continues, “I think the whole fabric of how we access, search, find and get information is going to be radically different.”
The BBC reports that Verisign, which is responsible for looking after the .com domain, currently logs 53 billion requests for websites – not just .coms – every day, and Mr. McLaughlin told BBC News, “We expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between three and four quadrillions (1 quadrillion is 1,000 billion).”
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
