25 Years Ago Today, the First Dot.com URL Was Registered

By John Farrier in Blogs & Internet, History on Mar 15, 2010 at 12:59 pm

Twenty-five years ago today, Symbolics Computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, registered Symbolics.com as a URL. It was the first such claim in computing history:

That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.

It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered.[...]

It is unlikely that the early dotcoms were thought of as businesses as the early internet was not seen as a place for commerce but rather as a platform for governmental and educational bodies to trade ideas.

Scholars generally agree that a turning point was the introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape that brought mainstream consumers on to the web.

Link via Gizmodo | Image: FBI


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  1. Cola
    Mar 15th, 2010 at 2:49 pm

    The internet was a different place back then… It was kind of like the frontier. Untamed, a little scary in its wildness, but ripe with possibility.

    1997 was the year that I settled on using Cola as an internet handle, and also my real nickname.

  2. Wes
    Mar 15th, 2010 at 11:40 pm

    Pet Peeve: “dot.com” would be read “dot dot com.”

    (It also drives me batty when someone writes “$10 dollars.”)

  3. Gauldar
    Mar 16th, 2010 at 10:14 am

    @Cola

    Sure, but where would we be today without all the porn, advertising and cats that infest teh internets?

  4. Ilan Ben Menachem
    Mar 18th, 2010 at 12:52 pm

    Thank for tell this thing.otherwise never i will know.

  5. Nic Stevens
    Apr 28th, 2010 at 10:32 am

    a URL is a uniform resource locator and was invented at Cern for web browsing and using a browser to act on other resources. In 1985 there was no such thing as a URL.

    symbolics.com is a DOMAIN name which may point to one or infinite hosts within that domain. It’s not a URL


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