On March 15, 1985, a Massachusetts computer systems firm registered the first .com Internet domain name.
Although Symbolics.com didn’t spark an instant gold rush, the event planted the first seed of a transformation that has changed the world into a Web-fueled digital river of news, commerce and social interaction.
Exactly 25 years later, life B.C – Before .Com – is already a distant memory, especially in the tech-centric Bay Area.
“Can you remember what it was like before the Internet, before .com?” said Mark McLaughlin, president and chief executive officer of VeriSign Inc. of Mountain View. “What about the next 25 years? Who can imagine that?”
VeriSign, the Internet security vendor that administers the .com registry, is hosting an event in Washington on Tuesday celebrating the milestone, with former President Bill Clinton scheduled to deliver a keynote address. And on May 26 in San Francisco City Hall, VeriSign will honor Internet innovators at a “25 Years of .com Gala” hosted by comedian Dana Carvey.
In a relatively short time, the dot-com revolution has “woven itself into every nook and cranny of the commercial world,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a Washington think tank that studies the social impacts of the Internet. “It usually takes technologies a lot longer to insinuate themselves into the basic rhythms of people’s lives.”
But there was hardly a ripple when Symbolics Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of computer systems and software based on research done at MIT, signed up the first .com with Network Solutions, the domain registration firm that was acquired by VeriSign in 2000.
Symbolics founders who were contacted for this story didn’t even remember the event. The assets and intellectual property of the original publicly traded Symbolics Inc. have been taken over by a privately held firm of the same name. The Symbolics.com Web site still exists, but was purchased in 2009 by XF.com, an Internet domain investment firm.
In 1985, only six entities registered a .com, one of six top-level domain names created a year earlier in a reorganization of the early Internet’s naming bureaucracy. At the time, .cor (short for corporate) almost beat .com as the designation for commercial Internet addresses.
Rainie said Symbolics.com signaled the entry of an entrepreneurial spirit to a nascent online world dominated by a “libertarian leftist” class that saw the Internet as a way to “democratize power” and circumvent big powerful institutions like government and big business.
Internet historians believe the Internet would have evolved “very differently if commercial interests had not asserted themselves, particularly at the dawn of the Web, but even in the pre-Web period,” Rainie said.
By 1992, fewer than 15,000 .com domains were registered, but the number would flourish after Web browsers brought mainstream consumers into the World Wide Web and “made it so convenient to navigate,” McLaughlin said.
Since then, .coms have defined the Internet. Now there are 84 million domain names, including 11.9 million e-commerce and online business sites, 4.3 million entertainment sites, 3.1 million finance-related sites and 1.8 million sports sites.
According to a study released today by the Information Technology & Information Foundation, the annual economic benefits of the commercial Internet equal $1.5 trillion, which is “more than the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy and government investment in R&D (research and development) combined.”
The Internet should add $3.8 trillion to the global economy by 2020, which would exceed the gross domestic product of Germany, the report said. An estimated 1.7 billion people, 25.6 percent of the world’s population, now use the Internet.
“One can rightly describe the commercial Internet as a general-purpose technology, one whose significance to society should be viewed as on par with the advent of inexpensive steel, the telephone, the internal combustion engine or electricity,” according to the report, “The Internet Economy 25 Years After .Com.”
VeriSign logs 53 billion Web site lookups every day, about the same number handled for all of 1995, McLaughlin said. “We expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between 3 and 4 quadrillion,” he said.
First 10 .com domains
Symbolics.com – March 15, 1985
BBN.com – April 24, 1985
Think.com – May 24, 1985
MCC.com – July 11, 1985
DEC.com – Sept. 30, 1985
Northrop.com – Nov. 7, 1985
Xerox.com – Jan. 9, 1986
SRI.com – Jan. 17, 1986
HP.com – March 3, 1986
Bellcore.com – March 5, 1986
Source: www.iwhois.com/oldest
Most .com domains by ZIP Code
10001 (Manhattan): 9,611
95814 (Sacramento): 8,998
90210 (Beverly Hills): 7,239
94025 (Menlo Park): 6,674
Source: VeriSign Inc.
E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page DC – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/14/BUS61CEVQ6.DTL#ixzz0pgczB1XC
