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25 Years of the .com gTLD

Posted by Soulskill on from the i'm-not-sure-where-to-send-the-hallmark-card dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The domain COM was installed as one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet in January 1985. The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15th of March — the 25th anniversary of the day the first .com name was registered. Of the 250 million websites, there are over 80 million active .com sites. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in .com (however, on 27 August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments). That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon. Here is a list of the 100 oldest still-existing registered .com domains."

4 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. No .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No microsoft.com ?

    1. Re:No .. by nxtw · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet and all included access to the World Wide Web.

      Except for perhaps MSN, these services included access to only parts of the Internet. CompuServe added Internet email access earlier than the others in 1989, and AOL added Usenet in 1993. Prodigy added a web browser (no sockets support) in 1994.

      I don't think these services started offering real Internet (with TCP sockets support) until after the release of Windows 95.

      Much the same reason IPv6 wasn't added to Windows until Vista even though IPv6's specifications were stable enough by the release of XP SP2 in 2005.

      IPv6 wasn't enabled by default until Vista, but was included with XP from the beginning. (The version included with the original XP release was included as an unsupported preview.) MS also released experimental IPv6 implementations for NT4 and 2000.

    2. Re:No .. by digitalcowboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet and all included access to the World Wide Web.

      I'm not sure if you're wrong about this or I've misunderstood what you're trying to say. But (unfortunately) I wasted a couple months in the mid 90's doing (outsourced) tech support for CompuServe, after first discovering it on a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981 with a 300 baud "coupler" style modem that required a telephone handset to be firmly inserted.

      I suspect you're not wrong, just imprecise and I'm being pedantic. However, in the 90's, CompuServe was dying a slow death trying to keep a proprietary hold on something that had become an open commodity. You're correct that at that point it had become a "value-added content [layer] on top of services provided by the Internet and ... included access to the World Wide Web."

      It didn't start out that way and pre-dated any public access to the internet by more than a decade. AOL came later as well as Prodigy and Apple's failed attempt at e-something or other. (eWorld? I'm too old to remember and too lazy to check it.)

      None of them adapted well to the rapidly changing landscape. What's more, when I was doing tech support for CS, it was owned by H&R Block. I joined in February and as tax day approached our internal network slowed to a crawl - as in: click a button on the internal ticket system and wait literally 5 minutes for a response over the WAN. It seems H&R bought the company for the physical network because they only needed it for a few months a year. As with most parasites, they quickly managed to kill the host. (My "supervisors" kept saying, "Hang in there until April 16th and everything'll be back to normal.")

      Not that the internet wouldn't have killed CS anyway, but the short-sightedness was amazing.

      Now then. About my lawn and your presence on it...

  2. They should have kept the price high by Jazz-Masta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When it was only InterNIC assigning domain names, it was $100/year, and then $70/year. I remember carefully choosing which domains to register - and so did everyone else. There were very few squatters back then.

    I believe passing the torch to ICANN, and then having GoDaddy (Wild West) pop up offering $6 .COM will be remembered as the ruin of the Internet. Not to mention the 2-3 day "evaluation" period where squatters could hold a domain without paying for it.

    Now they've opened up .CO (Columbian) for non-Columbian registration. Pre-registration is $299, and the registrars are trying to push it as the next big TLD.