On March 15th, 1985 Symbolic Computers registered the first .com domain, symbolic.com, becoming the first company in history to register a top level domain. It still exists to this day and is used as the personal blog of Aron Meystedt, owner of xf.com, which acquired the domain in August of 2009. Growth of the Internet between then and 1997 was significantly slow, with the 1 millionth .com registered that year. This was primarily because of the lack of consumer use of the web during the 80s and 90s. During that period, it was used mostly by academic and scientific users. With the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1992, more people connected to the fledgling web.
Today the internet offers a plethora of services and information, including shopping, social networking, travel, research and learning, and entertainment. It has grown well beyond its intended purpose and an estimated 1.7 billion people now use the internet. That’s a quarter of the world’s population! Clearly the web has become an integral part of our daily lives. It’s estimated an average of 668,000 .com domains are registered every day. A list of the 100 oldest existing .coms is available from DNS Knowledge@ http://dnsknowledge.com/news/25-years-of-the-com/. Verisign now logs 53 billion requests for .com websites every day, the same number handled for all of 1995.
