The .Com Turned 25
On March 15, 1985 appeared on the Web the first domain name with the. Com: Symbolics.com a commercial site specializing in artificial intelligence. Twenty-five years later, the domain name’s owner has changed , but success of the . Com doesn’t need is any further proof. Of more than 192 million domains worldwide in 2009, there are 80 million. Com. 668 000 new domain names, with this extension, are added each month.
the first domain symbolics.com, was acquired by a company based in Massachusetts, the company sold computers specially designed to run the programming language Lisp. Symbolics thus presents itself as the leading manufacturer of industrial machinery on which turned the Genera operating system. The domain name was then sold to investment firm XF.com.
only five other domain names were registered that year (BBN.com, Think.com, MCC.com, and DEC.com Northrop.com) against 54 the following year. It’s only twelve years later in 1997 that the millionth . Com was registered. According to OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), between 1985 and 2000, 21 million domain names have been registered against 57 million between 2000 and 2010. The BBC reports also that each month 668 000 domain names with the. Com registered or renewed on registrars.
The . com extension was initially intended to be . cor (corporation). In the same way. Org was originally.pub and . Mil , Other extensions of domain names that were launched with the. Com are. Edu . Gov . Net and. Arpa” . . com find its origins in the term company (business) and not commercial, as is commonly said today.
Now the . Com is the guarantee of an international dimension of a business, although its scope exceeds that of commercial sites. the company Verisign, which manages this extension and the. Net affirms that only Twelve million sites are oriented toward the e-commerce.
If the . Com looks like a success story, its growth was still difficult until 2000. Two and a half years after the first record, there were only one hundred domain names registered. The first big companies who have adopted this extension were IBM, Intel, the operator AT & T and Cisco. . Com has passed the symbolic threshold of one million in 1997. In total, between 1985 and 2000, 21 million domain names were registered against 57 million between 2000 and 2010.
Often preferred to national extensions, The . Com is primarily an economic windfall, particularly for VeriSign, which manages only the allocation of domain names. Com. Indeed, if ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the administrative authority responsible for assigning an address registered to the IP addresses of computers, it delegates. Com and. Net to Verisign.
