Today, an internet milestone is reached with the 25th anniversary of the day the first dotcom website was registered. Back in March 1985, Symbolics computers in Cambridge, Massachusetts made history with an internet address ending in dotcom. Later that year, another five companies followed suit, effectively setting the very slow trend moving. It wasn’t until 1997 that the one millionth dotcom was registered.
Mark Mclaughlin, chief executive officer of Verisign- the company that is responsible for looking after the dotcom domain- was quoted as saying, “Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event.” It’s even more surprising because of the fact that for most of the late 1980s and early 1990s, very few people even knew what a dotcom was. The exact genesis of the dotcom name is unknown, but it certainly arrived at a time when there was a need for some sort of organising principles, as more bodies connected to the fledgling internet.
The early internet was not at all seen as a place for commerce as it is now, but was mainly used as a means for governmental and educational bodies to trade ideas. There’s general agreement that a turning point occured with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape. This allowed mainstream consumers on to the web. And now, with 668,000 dotcom sites registered every month, they have become part of the fabric of our lives.
25 years after their creation, people go to dotcom sites for shopping, entertainment, vacation planning, connecting with friends, learning new things and exchanging ideas. The dotcoms have enjoyed an impressive growth rate that would have been very difficult to predict 25 years ago, when a small computer firm took the first steps towards connecting the world. Courtesy of news.bbc.co.uk
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