(Tom Galvin) - Twenty-five years ago, I was a college sophomore focused on how the Mets would do in the upcoming season. Every few weeks, I’d visit the computer center to bang out a paper for a class on the shared computers. Usually, you had to wait until 1 or 2 in the morning before a computer would actually be available.
Right around that time, a group of people a lot smarter and visionary than me were creating what effectively became the on-ramp to the Internet. The domains .com, .net., .org and .edu were created. The response was underwhelming. Symbolics.com was the first .com registered, and only five more were even registered over the next year.
I bring it up because the 25th anniversary of .com is March 15th. Symbolics.com never really took off, but Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, CNN.com and millions more certainly did. Now, college sophomores expect the Internet available wherever they are whenever they want. And they get it. Two out of every three 18-29 year-olds say that if they lost the Internet for just 24 hours it would be “very disruptive” to their life and if it went down for a week it would have a “disastrous impact” on the economy, according to a Zogby/463 poll we conducted this winter.
We take .com for granted, of course, because it’s always there. But over the next few months VeriSign and other industry leaders will take a step back to look at where .com has been, and where it is going. That will essentially start on March 16 with a DC Policy Impact Forum that will include a keynote address by President Bill Clinton. It was during the Clinton Administration when another key milestone, the introduction of the web browser, that enabled regular folks to use the Internet. That was when it really took off.
If you are interested in the 25th Anniversary of .com, there is a website appropriately named 25yearsof.com that you can get information on the DC Policy Forum and a series of other activities around the anniversary.
President Clinton is but one of many high-profile speakers to attend the DC event, others include: Dr. Fareed Zakaria, author and journalist; Rob Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation; Rod Beckstrom, head of ICANN; Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO; and, Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post.
Among the invited guests will be high-school and college students, who will no doubt wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, hasn’t .com been around forever?
i was living the normal life of a little kid, sleeping, playing, fighting, crying, and on and on.
Posted by: abercrombie and fitch | March 06, 2010 at 01:29 AM
as compared to .com, i'm more interested in .net.
Posted by: abercrombie london | March 12, 2010 at 03:40 AM
went ahead and visited symbolics.com expecting to find something impressive
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Posted by: High Intensity Grade Reflective Sheeting | August 03, 2011 at 02:10 AM
The response was underwhelming. Symbolics.com was the first .com registered, and only five more were even registered over the next year.
Posted by: Augustine | July 09, 2012 at 12:11 AM
The transition to DNS was graadul, and the military are naturally conservative, so no, they weren't the first to migrate.Early DNS was all about the arpa TLD, which is no longer used for forward registration, so all those domains are gone and won't be coming back. I'd guess the claim is something like symbolics.com was registered longest ago of the 2LDs which still resolve today or something, sort of like claiming that some DC-8 used by a freight company in Africa is the "first plane" because hey, it's very old and it's still flying.
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