From the
‘
Significant Internet Milestones‘
files:
The very first dot com domain symbolics.com was registered 25 years ago today on March 15, 1985. From that event a quarter century ago, there are now over 192 million total domain name registrations, with some 96.7 million domain names that are registered as dot com or dot net.
What’s important to note about the 25 year milestone in my view is not the success of dot com, but rather its failure.
Remember back in 1985 there was no such thing as the web as we know it today and there was no such thing as the web browser either. Gopher and FTP were available but neither of those services are really what makes the Internet the global phenomenon that we all know today.
Simply having a domain name system and the generic dot com top level domain (TLD) was a start to the modern Internet era but on its own delivered little value to the masses.