Monday, March 15, 2010:
It all began on this day 25 years ago-the birth of that familiar phrase 'dot.com', which heralded humankind's giant step into the digital domain. On 15 March 1985, a Massachusetts-based IT firm named Symbolics suffixed dotcom to its name. It was soon followed by Bbn.com and Think.com.
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Then followed the proverbial lull before the storm. The market lay dormant for the next few years-in 1985 only six dotcom names were registered-before the boom practically reshaped the world we know today. Nowadays as many as 100,000 dotcoms are registered every day. Internet search giant Google's crawler indexed its trillionth page in 2008, says The Telegraph.
Symbolics.com, which dealt in IT systems and software, registered the first .com with Network Solutions, a domain registration firm. In those early days of the fledgling IT industry, computer firms formed a majority of the first 100 registered dotcom names. Apple registered itself on 19 February, 1987, while Microsoft entered into the business in 1991. There are now 84 million domain names.
The Symbolics website says the domain '.com' took shape as more and more companies linked themselves with the Internet. Says Craig Partridge, from Raytheon BBN Technologies, "'.cor' was first proposed as the domain for corporations, but eventually it was switched to '.com'. It is thought that '.com' originally derviced from "commercial".
Mark McLaughlin, CEO, Verisign, said, "Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the Internet would be today and the number of businesses that have been built on it."
Ashish Joshi, EFYTIMES News Network
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