How time flies.
It’s hard to believe that 30 years ago, the .com Internet domain was born.
Today, when anyone thinks of the Internet they likely think of .com (or possibly silly pictures of cats), but prior to March 15, 1985 it just didn’t exist.
For those who are wondering, the Domain Name System (DNS) was put in place so people didn’t have to remember long numerical addresses for every website. For instance, the unique numerical address of the White House site is 198.137.240.100. Now, you could get to the site by typing that long string of numbers into your browser’s address box, however thanks to the DNS, which correlates a numerical address to a word, you just have to type whitehouse.gov to get there.
Domain names usually have two or more parts separated by dots and typically consist of an organization’s name and a three-letter or more suffix. For example, this newspaper’s domain name is squamishchief.com. Usually, the suffix describes the type of business as well. There’s .gov for government, .edu for education, .net for networks, .mil for the military and .org for organizations. Addresses that end in .com are supposed to be reserved for “commercial” sites.
And although there were certainly other domains that predated it (like .arpa, for instance), .com was the one that pretty much started the whole Internet boom and has since become a big part of our culture and language.
But it was a pretty slow start.
The very first .com domain name bought in ’85 was symbolics.com, and by the end of the year, only five other .com sites had been registered.
It would take another two years before there was an even 100 sites using the .com suffix, but between ’95 and 2000, things really took off and the so-called dotcom bubble blew that number up to more than 20 million.
Of course, history tells us that the initial .com bubble burst around the year 2000, wiping out untold millions of dollars and young dotcom millionaires who were awesome at getting investors, but not so great at turning their web portals into profits.
Today, it seems pretty much every business that wants to succeed has to have a .com domain, with .com domains being registered at an average of one per second, according to a CNN story on the subject.
But there’s also now something like 810 of these so-called top-level domain names out there being used (although some few have been retired and are no longer functional), and although .com is still the undisputed champion of the World Wide Web, upstarts like .beer (for beer lovers and aficionados), .church (for the religious types) and .xxx (not for those religious types) are cropping up all the time and vying for their specialized corner of the Internet.
While it’s difficult to predict if these newer and more focused domain suffixes will supplant .com and render it obsolete in the future of digital content, you still have to recognize and celebrate what its done for the development of the ’net and funny cat videos everywhere.
So, happy birthday .com… and thanks for helping the world waste time, post pictures of their body parts and harass strangers for the past 30 years.
