3 Decades of .COM – How Things Have Changed

It’s borderline impossible these days to imagine a world without the web. Just think about it for a minute or two – no email, no social media, no streaming entertainment…pretty much nothing we’ve all come to take for granted. And this is exactly what makes life in the 80s so difficult to difficult to remember correctly, as not only were we living in an era without the web, but a good 99% of us never dreamed we’d own a Smartphone.

With the incredible changes that have come about since then, it’s quite incredible to think that the first ever dot.com registration took place just 30 years ago. That’s the hugely important anniversary the world will be collectively celebrating tomorrow – exactly three decades to the day since www.symbolics.com was officially registered by the brand of the same name.

And just in case you were wondering, the answer is yes – it’s still up and running today. The domain that is…the business folded quite some time ago.

“In the last 30 years, the Internet has evolved from an unknown phenomenon used primarily by academics and researchers to a global communication, commerce and information sharing channel that few could imagine life without,” commented the domain name registration gurus at Verisign.

“In fact, nearly three billion people around the world are online today, and more than $300 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales and over $1.3 trillion in global e-commerce sales rely on the Internet.”

When the first registration was made in 1985, few could have ever predicted that the whole dot.com industry would be worth in excess of $1.3 trillion dollars and reach three billion people globally before its 30^thbirthday. And things are still growing, with the current rate of dot.com domain name registrations having spiked to an average of one every second.