Yesterday was the birthday of one of the most ubiquitous terms of the past 10 years; on the 15th of March 2010 the .com top level domain was 25 years old!
The first .com domain was registered on the 15th of March 1985 by computer manufacturer Symbolics Inc. however this did not mark the beginning of the boom; in fact, in the first year they were available only five other companies registered a .com address. Even by the end of 1987 only 100 .com domains exsisted!
It took over 10 years for the real boom of the .com age, by 1997 there were around a million registered .com addresses. It was in the two years that followed that the registrations really took off, with over 20 million new addresses being registered!
It was at the beginning of the 00’s that the so called .com bubble was said to burst, registrations of new addresses began to cool off and became steadier (currently VeriSign, who handles .com registry, report half a million new registrations a week).
Here at Glo Networks we handle both our own .com addresses and those of our customers. Though we by no means claim the oldest of the .com domains we do have one that hails from the boom of the late nineties, specifically cconnor.com, registered 1999. When compared to some of the most popular websites of today (youtube.com was registered in 2005) it could certainly be considered well matured!
Tags: .com, domain, web address
