“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
Yesterday I was looking through the windows. Today it’s dot coms.
Technically I’m a week late but I thought I would wish good old Dot.Com many happy returns anyway.
Thirty years ago, on March 15th 1985, the first dot.com domain name was registered. It was symbolics.com.
It wasn’t a significant event at the time because way back in 1985 about the only people using the internet on a commercial basis were US government contractors. Ecommerce giants such as Amazon.com and Ebay.com hadn’t even been thought of.
It has all changed since then of course. Slowly at first, only four other dot.coms were registered in 1985, but now thirty years on the total number of registered top-level domains, or TLDs as they are known sometimes, has surpassed 288 million and showing no signs of stopping.
That total includes over 115 million dot coms, which are still the most sought after and most valuable, but there are also dot nets, dot orgs, dot biz, dot infos and a host of others. In fact more than 500 new TLDs are being added to the internet right now, with another 500 in the pipeline.
And the dot com era has spawned an entirely new industry. These names are now traded like commodities, most worth a few bucks, but quite a number making it to 6 and 7 figures (that’s over $1million!).
So what happened to the symbolics.com name? It was eventually sold off for an undisclosed sum to a Dallas, Texas-based investor group in August 2009.
Like I said at the start, Happy Birthday Dot.com, the first thirty years have been good.
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