Dot.coms have their silver anniversary

TODAY IS the 25th anniversary of the world's first registered .com name.

In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts became the first outfit to register an Internet address ending in .com. That same year a whopping five other companies signed up so it was not exactly a winner at first. It was not until 1997 that the one millionth dot.com address was registered.

The world wide web did not become popular until the arrival of the Mosaic web browser, written by Netscape, that brought mainstream consumers onto the web.

Even ten years ago many companies didn't think about having a website, but now everyone has one. Between 1985 and 2000 more than 21 million domain names were registered, while 57 million domain names were registered between 2000 and 2010.

But alas, owning the first .com domain name did Symbolics little good. The company was a computer manufacturer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, which is now marketed as Open Genera running under Tru64 UNIX on HP systems.

In those days Symbolics' machine was the first commercially available 'workstation' and the company made some good hardware.

However the cancellation of the US military's Star Wars programme meant that Symbolics' fortunes started to go south. All its assets were flogged to a privately held company that continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.

The symbolics.com domain was purchased by XF.com in 2009. µ