Thirty years ago this Sunday, on March 15, 1985, the first .com domain was registered, changing the Internet forever.
A now defunct computer company called Symbolics first registered the domain symbolics.com six years before the World Wide Web, which we use to access information on the Internet, was launched in 1991.
"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," said Verisign, a domain name seller. "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."
The adoption of the .com domain was not a fast one, especially given the fact that the World Wide Web had not yet been launched. In fact, it wasn't until 1987 that there were 100 .com domains. Today, however, one .com domain name is launched every single second, equating to roughly 80,000 registrations per day.
It was in 1987 that a number of big names in tech really started to take notice of what would become the Internet. Apple and Cisco respectively registered Apple.com and Cisco.com in 1987, two years before the first dial-up Internet provider called The World was launched in 1989.
Of course, again, that was two years before the World Wide Web was launched, enabling public access to information shared on .com websites. It all took off after that.
In 1994, the great Amazon.com was registered and launched, only a year before the likes of Yahoo and AOL joined in the fun. Yahoo was first launched as "Jerry and Dave's Guide to the World Wide Web" before being renamed to Yahoo later that same year.
Soon after, in 1996, Hotmail.com was launched, as was Expedia.com, which largely changed the way that travel is booked.
While it might have changed completely since then, in 1997, Netflix.com was launched as a video rental service. Of course, one year later, Google.com went live, completely changing how information is found through the Internet.
Other major milestones include the launch of Skype.com in 2003, which made voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, a mainstream idea, as well as the launch of TheFacebook.com in 2004, which of course went on to become Facebook.com. YouTube.com was launched in 2005, one year before Twitter.com.
