The First .com Domain Was Registered 25 Years Ago

The .com domain name is 25 years old today, with March 15, 1985 marking the date of the first registered domain Symbolics.com. Today, there are tens of millions of .com domain names, but things didn't move too fast at the very beginning. In fact, for the full year of 1985, only six .com domains were registered as compared to the 100,000 now registered every day.

The domain name is one of the first five top level domains (TLDs) introduced in 1985, but has since become the most popular by far. The other initial domain names are edu, gov, mil, net, and org. It took two and a half months before the first company registered a .com domain name after they became available. A Massachusetts-based computer systems company, Symbolics, registered its name under a 'commercial' domain name, though the event was hardly regarded as noteworthy at the time.

Other companies followed, mostly computer companies, but the rate was one about every month and it took a full year until ten .com domain names were registered. Things didn't really pick up too fast and, by 1992, less than 15,000 .com domain names had been registered, hardly an impressive number. However, the World Wide Web revolution would soon change that and, as soon as people were able to get online much easier and navigate in an intuitive manner, registrations exploded. Now, there are 84 million .com domain names registered, and the number is still growing at an accelerated pace.

Despite its promise to be a universal and cheap means of communication and access to information, which has been fulfilled without doubt, the Internet was spurred by commercial interest as much in the early days at is now. After the web became relatively popular in the early 90s, plenty of companies sought their fortunes in the nascent market leading to a lot of billionaires, but also a lot of spectacular failures and the famous "dotcom bubble burst."