The dot com turns 25
On March 14, 1985, if you wanted to visit a commercial company’s Web site, you needed to know the string of numbers which made up its IP address. But a day later that changed for one firm at least.
Today marks the anniversary of the first .com domain registration, taken by a computer manufacturer named Symbolics. The symbolics.com address is still in use today but was sold to a domain trading firm last year.
Six top-level domains were officially created in January 1985 (.com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org), though it appears Symbolic was the first to register any of these. Other early adopters included Xerox, HP, IBM, Sun and AT&T, all of which were among the first 15 .com registrations.
It took until late 1987 before the 100th .com address was registered. Today an estimated 80 million .com names are in use, of which 99.9 percent have been registered since 1995.
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