Happy birthday .Com – Completing 30 years

Did you know that the .com Internet domain was born just 30 years ago? The first registered .com was Symbolics.com. In case you’re not familiar, the companies and organizations that hand out Internet addresses use top-level domains like .com to organize the addresses.

Michael Pearson, CNN, in his 30 years of  .Com, takes a look back at one of the granddaddies of domains as it enters in its fourth decade, and ahead at what its future might hold.

(CNN)There’s a bit of video that goes around the Internet every so often, showing a couple of clueless 1990s television hosts trying to decipher the mysteries of the Internet.

“What is Internet, anyway?” NBC “Today” show host Bryant Gumbel asks in the 1994 clip after stumbling through an email address that ends in the now-famous .com suffix, as if it’s written in some alien language.

The first .com domain name — Symbolics.com — was registered March 15, 1985. Only five others joined it that year. It would take two years for the first 100 names to be registered, according to Verisign, the company that now manages the extension. But between 1995 and 2000 — the era of the “dot-com bubble” — registrations finally did take off, rocketing from 9,005 to more than 20 million.

• It didn’t explode onto the scene. It was more of a trickle
• It reshaped our economy
• It defined an era
• Along the way, it gained some baggage
• New domain names to expand web
• But it’s still going strong
• What will the future hold?

You can read the full story here: 30 years of  .Com  Featured image credit: http://calvinayre.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/domain-name.jpg