30 years of .com domains

Baku.16 March.REPORT.AZ/ March 15, 1985, might not be a date etched in your memory (if, indeed, you were even alive), but that was when the first .com (“dot com”) domain name was born - 30 years ago this weekend, as it happens.

A computer manufacturer called Symbolics registered Symbolics.com at a time when it quite literally had the choice of any word or name on the planet to procure for its domain. But given the company’s name, well, Symbolics.com made the most sense.

Today, that name is still registered and active, making it officially the oldest .com on the Internet, though it was bought by a small investment group called XF.com in 2009. 

1990 was a key year for the Internet, as this was when the World Wide Web came to life out of a room at CERN in Switzerland - it was this that gave the Internet a proper usable interface. Up to that point, the Internet could be used for communicating in boring old text, but with the web, this brought in sounds, pictures, and general prettiness - a user-focused interface, or “user interface.”

In the 25 years since then, many milestone dot-com moments have taken place - Microsoft.com (1993), AOL.com (1995), Amazon.com (1995), eBay.com (1995), Google.com (1997), Facebook.com (2004, as “thefacebook.com”), YouTube.com (2005), and Twitter.com (2006).