March 15, 2010 marks the 25 years of the .COM domain names. On March 15, 1985, Symbolics Inc. registered the first .com Internet domain name symbolics.com. VeriSign is hosting an event in Washington on today (Tuesday) celebrating the milestone, with former President Bill Clinton scheduled to deliver a keynote address.
Symbolics Inc. is then a Cambridge, Massachusetts based maker of computer systems and software based on research done at MIT. They signed up the first .com with Network Solutions, the domain registration firm that was acquired by VeriSign in 2000.
According to the SF Chronicle report, Symbolics founders didn’t even remember the event of registering the domain name. The assets and intellectual property of the original publicly traded Symbolics Inc. have been taken over by a privately held firm of the same name. The Symbolics.com Web site still exists, but was purchased in 2009 by XF.com, an Internet domain investment firm.
[advt]
In 1985, only six entities registered a .com. By 1992, fewer than 15,000 .com domains were registered. Now there are 84 million domain names, including 11.9 million e-commerce and online business sites, 4.3 million entertainment sites, 3.1 million finance-related sites and 1.8 million sports sites.
The annual economic benefits of the commercial Internet equal $1.5 trillion. The Internet should add $3.8 trillion to the global economy by 2020. An estimated 1.7 billion people, 25.6 percent of the world’s population, now use the Internet. [source: sfgate.com]
Symbolics.com, BBN.com, Think.com, MCC.com, DEC.com, Northrop.com, Xerox.com, SRI.com, HP.com and Bellcore.com are the oldest 10 .com domain names. You may want to check out the list of 100 oldest registered .com domains.
Be the first to comment