Today, ladies and gents, is too special a day to let us pass by. March 15, as it happens, is the 25th birthday of the revolutionary dot.com. Yep, the big 2-5. But is anyone counting? And it is amazing to even imagine the world without it.
25 years ago the first-ever .com was registered and has since altered the course of history to put the world at our fingertips. Growing by the day, the Internet offers access and opportunity where there previously was none. It has changed the very fabric of how we interact, inform, conduct business, donate, educate, communicate, connect, and share stories with others across the country, continent and all over the world.
Imagine business, technology and innovation without .com. . . news, media and government without it. . . YouTube.com and Facebook.com and Twitter.com without those three tiny fragments. Sure, dot.com is not the only online destination, now joined by the rise of URLs that include the likes of .me, .ly and .xxx. Still, its long-lasting impact is hard too overstate. As the celebratory site www.25yearsof.com points out: "1985's most lasting contribution turned out to be three letters and a punctuation mark."
There are some 84 million .com domains today -- 11.9 million are business and e-commerce sites, 4.3 million are entertainment-oriented, 3.1 million are finance-related and 1.8 million are all about sports. Business. Entertainment. Sports. Clearly, dot.com is really about dot.life in general -- and how our lives have changed because of it.
The growth of .com, it must be noted, did not come quickly. Only five companies followed the footsteps of the Cambridge-based computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc. when it registered the first .com on March 15, 1985. By the late 1980s, about 100 .coms existed, which included now tech powerhouses IBM, Intel, AT&T and Cisco. It wasn't until 12 years later, in 1997, a year after President Clinton signed the landmark 1996 Telecommunications Act, that .com names passed the 1 million mark.
And it's been growing since. So much so, in fact, that back in 1995, VeriSign handled 18 billion queries. These days, VeriSign handles that same amount of queries in 8 hours.
This is an especially big week for the Internet -- where it was just 25 years ago; where it stands now, in our social media-driven world; and where it will be and where it needs to be in future.
Marking dot.com's silver anniversary, VeriSign will host a small, exclusive, day-long policy forum in Washington, D.C. tomorrow, headlined by President Clinton. The dot.com president will deliver a keynote speech on how the Internet has ushered the era of global connectedness -- what we here at HuffPost Tech call the birth of online global citizenship. On the same day, Julius Genachowski, the blog-friendly chairman of the Federal Communication Commission, will release its ambitious and anxiously awaited National Broadband Plan, a comprehensive road-map for bringing fast, affordable high speed Internet access to all Americans. It's high-time we think of our Internet infrastructure in the same way we thought of the Interstate highways in the last century. And on Thursday, the all-important and underrated Sunlight Foundation, which has championed online transparency in government, will launch a national, non-partisan campaign for real-time transparent government.
That's a movement everyone can and will get behind -- as we sit at home and at work, perhaps just on our cell phones, browsing our dot.coms.
DID YOU KNOW:
In April 1985 cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu and ucla.edu were the first registered domain names.
The first "dot com" was SYMBOLICS.COM March 15 1985
The first .gov was css.gov and was registered in June 1985.
The first .org was mitre.org and was registered in July 1985.
1995 Amazon sells it first book
1995 Microsoft released Windows 95 and their web browser, Internet Explorer
1997, Google registered as a domain.
1999 Y2K threat is imminent
2003 MySpace launches
2004 Facebook launches
2005 Google Earth unveiled
2010 - 84 millions dot.com domains registered
25yearsof.com
History of .com
Dot com may be the most popular of those three little fragments that helped reshape the world, but the first registered name occurred without fanfare. A computer manufacturer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Symbolics, Inc. was the first to stake a claim in .com on March 15, 1985. What followed was hardly a gold rush: that year only five other companies signed up a name.
Early Challenges
At the time, the Internet was largely a project for computer scientists and universities who wanted a way to communicate. As more and more people and institutions discovered the growing network that was set up by the Defense Department, it became increasingly shabby place. Stories about the difficulty of sending an email pepper the early history of the Internet. One of the challenging things in the 1980s was getting mail from one network to another. Figuring out how to manually route through gateways was something of a black art -- and often not officially sanctioned. As mail loads got heavier, sometimes postmasters would ask for people to stop using their connections.
The Birth of .com
The need for some sort of organizing principles became more and more apparent as more entities connected into the fledgling Internet. Bringing order to the increasingly chaotic universe fell to the legendary Jon Postel and his colleagues at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.
Postel who was called the "King" of the Internet became the request for comment (RFC) editor in 1969. As RFC editor, Postel and his colleagues personally shaped the Internet as we know it today. In October 1984, RFC 920 "on the requirements of establishing a new domain in the ARPA-Internet and the DARPA research community" was published, setting the stage for the birth of .com.
While we know that the first .com was assigned to symbolics.com on March 15, 1985, the genesis of .com is less clear. According to Craig Partridge, chief scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies, the name for domains evolved as the system was created. At first, .cor was proposed as the domain for corporations, but when the final version came out it was switched to .com. Likewise, .org was originally .pub and .mil was originally .ddn. Other domains that came into being at the same time as .com were .edu, .gov, .net and .arpa.
Jack Haverty, another Internet pioneer who was at MIT at the time, said they weren't really thinking about business when they were developing the top-level domains. "I think .com originally was derived from "company" rather than "commercial." The. com's weren't thought of as "businesses" in the sense of places that consumers go to buy things," he wrote in an email. "They were companies doing government contract work. The Internet was not chartered to interconnect businesses - it was a military command-and-control prototype network, being built by educational, governmental, and contractors."
Since most of the Internet's pioneers were involved in educational institutions, the military and government, it would explain why the other top-level domains seem more intuitive. Since what would become the Internet wasn't set up to do business, and the profit-motive wasn't officially sanctioned, Internet pioneers wouldn't naturally think about a .biz or something else. Still, they seemed to understand that some kind of commerce was coming.
The .com Bubble
But to say that .com took some time to take off is an understatement. Two and a half years after the first registration, only 100 total .com domains existed. Among the early adopters included IBM, Intel, AT&T and Cisco. By 1992, there were still less than 15,000 .com domains registered and the million-domain mark wasn't crossed until 1997, well into the Internet boom. Then came the ".com boom", with nearly 20 million names registered in the next two years. It also ushered in something termed "cybersquatting," where domains of famous people or companies were registered in hopes of getting a hefty sum to sell it. Nations implemented laws to combat cybersquatting, and the entertainer Madonna won a notable case in 2000 to get control of madonna.com.
The burst of the ".com bubble" cooled off the rapid growth for a short period, and since then .com has grown at a steady rate, with now more than 80 million domains. Yet, some of the most popular websites today were registered late into the .com era. Youtube.com, for example, wasn't registered until 2005. Twitter.com was also registered after the .com boom.
While Symbolics the company didn't fare well, symbolics.com remains as the oldest .com and was purchased by Aron Meystedt, owner of XF.com in 2009.
.com Today
Today, .com is an integral part of a technology boom that reshaped the way people work, live, play and connect with family and friends. Much to the amazement of its creators. "I don't recall anybody ever thinking we were creating an organizational structure to encompass hundreds of millions of entities covering the entire planet in support of all human activities," Haverty explained in another email. "And it certainly wasn't supposed to last for 30+ years, even as an experiment. It just happened to turn out that way."
He Pingping, the world's shortest man, has died at the age of 21, AFP reports. Pingping was 2 feet, 5 inches tall. His death was announced by the a spokesman for the Guinness World records.
