The Dotcom domain extension is celebrating its 25th anniversary today as March 15, 1986 marks the day that the very first .com name, Symbolics.com was registered by Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The first year saw the registration of just an additional 5 domain names and it wasn’t until 1997, some 11 years later before another milestone was reached, the registration of the one millionth domain name. During the late 80s and 90s, the Internet was still a fledgling technology, one that was associated with the military and academic institutes. It’s generally believed that the launch of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape is what brought surfing the internet (on dial up modem connections) to the masses.
Fast forward to today and the Internet dominates every facet of life. Pretty much everything is going online. Headline news is available, online shopping is here and if you need to research a topic for a school project, it generally begins with a Google search. Today, an average month sees about 668,000 new dotcom registrations and it’s estimated that 1.7 billion people or 25% of the world’s population browses the Internet.
It’s also been projected that by 2020, Internet related business will add $3.8 trillion to the world economy which is more then the GDP (gross domestic product) of Germany.
