What Happened On March 15th?

In 1985, technology would begin to shift gears. On March 15th, the internet as we know it was born, with the registration of the world’s first domain name: Symbolics.com. Although the news did not exactly “exhilarate” people, this first registration laid the foundation for the vast and interconnected web today.

Symbolics.com belonged to Symbolics Inc., a computer systems company at the forefront of artificial intelligence research. This company, heavily involved in symbolic manipulation (a core concept in AI), chose a domain name that perfectly reflected their innovative work.

While Symbolics.com is widely recognized as the first registered domain, there’s a minor historical debate. Nordu.net, a domain for a Scandinavian research collaboration, claims to have been created a month earlier (January 1, 1985). However, Nordu.net wasn’t technically “registered” in the way we think of it today.

Back then, domain names were managed through a central file maintained by the Jon Postel at ISI (Information Sciences Institute) at the University of Southern California. Symbolics.com was the first to go through this registration process, making it the first “official” domain.

In the early days of the internet, domain names were free and assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Today, domain registration is a multi-billion dollar industry, with popular domain names fetching millions of dollars. Cars.com, for example, was sold for a whopping $872 million in 2011!

The late 1990s were years of the “dot-com boom,” where companies with “.com” in their domain names were seen as synonymous with internet success. This period saw a curious phenomenon where businesses not even on the internet rushed to register “.com” domains, hoping to capitalize on the craze. This frenzy eventually led to a spectacular crash in the early 2000s, leaving many companies with useless domain names and broken dreams.

Speaking of the early 2000s, one of the most prominent domains in the world went online in 2001… The Wikipedia!

While “.com” still is the most popular domain extension, there’s now a vast array of options available, which cater to specific locations (.co.uk for the United Kingdom), professions (.io for startups in the tech industry), and even interests (.pizza for, well, pizza places!).

This explosion of extensions has led to some creative and quirky domain names, like “iceland.is” (a perfect fit for the island nation of Iceland) or “law.firm” (straightforward and to the point!).

Believe it or not, there’s a whole industry built around typos and domain name squatting. This involves registering common misspellings of popular websites (like facebok.com instead of facebook.com) in hopes of profiting by redirecting users to the wrong site or selling the domain name to the rightful owner for a hefty sum.

There have been cases of people registering domain names on a whim, only to see them become incredibly valuable later. One such story involves a man who registered the domain name “business.com” in 1995 for a mere $100. Years later, he sold it for $7.5 million!

Did you know that later that year, Microsoft 1.0 was launched on November 20th by Bill Gates? This year was the year of technology and digital advancements!