The .com TLD Celebrates 25th Birthday

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Who’d have thought it’s been so long…Since the first .com TLD was registered? It’s been a whole 25 years! A quarter of a century! 25 years since the first .com domain name was registered. Amazing! Outstanding!

On April 26, 1985, a man called Charles Hornig complained on a mailing list that his new symbolics.com email address wasn’t working. Scanning every mail server on the internet, all 1,008 of them, he discovered only one was configured to handle a .com address.

“I am not heartened by these results,” he wrote. “Maybe we should go back to .ARPA, which people at least understand?”

Twenty-five years ago today, his company, Symbolics, was the first to register a .com domain name. It was over a month before the second was registered and only three more were registered that year.

Today, there are almost 90 million .coms, with half a million new ones added every week. VeriSign, the .com registry, handles over 50 billion DNS queries every day. It’s difficult to imagine an internet without it.

Go ahead and read the full article .com celebrates 25th birthday at [URL=“http://www.theregister.co.uk”]The Register. At the bottom of the news article you’ll see there’s also a link to a dedicated Website from VeriSign [URL=“http://25yearsof.com/”]celebrating the 25th Anniversary of .com TLD.

I love computing and Internet / WWW nostalgia! :smiley: Here’s to another 25 eventful years of the .com domain! :beer: :aparty:

Andrew Cooper

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The coverage of this on the local radio sucked.

“25 years since the first .com website” – there was no web 25 years ago

“…on the World Wide Web. Do you remember when we still called the internet the web?” – yeah, because we still call the internet the internet and the web the web!

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Sounds like whoever said that still doesn’t know what the difference is between the web and the internet.

Interesting that the issue the first domain had was with email since email is still the biggest part of the internet (way bigger than the web part).

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Wow, what a brutal first pick. I mean, you could have any domain name in the world and you go with Symbolics.com ?

In all seriousness though, I believe that back then there was a lot more paperwork to get a domain. Nobody could have predicted how domain names would be such an important tool of the future.

What would be even more interesting, is to find out who were among the first few to really catch on about the potential of domains as an investment asset. Who were some of the first ‘volume’ domain buyers, and what were the domains they were picking? Heck, let’s make a documentary !