Technology moves so fast that history, too often, gets buried in the digital dustbin. Was it just last month that Facebook celebrated its 6th birthday? Just a few days ago that Twitter marked its 10 billionth tweet?
But March 15, ladies and gents, is too special a day to let us pass by. March 15, as it happens, is the 25th birthday of the revolutionary dot.com. Yep, the big 2-5. Imagine business, technology and innovation without .com. . . news, media and government without it. . . YouTube.com and Facebook.com and Twitter.com without those three tiny fragments. Sure, dot.com is not the only online destination, now joined by the rise of URLs that include the likes of .me, .ly and .xxx. Still, its long-lasting impact is hard too overstate. As the celebratory site www.25yearsof.com points out: "1985's most lasting contribution turned out to be three letters and a punctuation mark."
There are some 84 million .com domains today -- 11.9 million are business and e-commerce sites, 4.3 million are entertainment-oriented, 3.1 million are finance-related and 1.8 million are all about sports. Business. Entertainment. Sports. Clearly, dot.com is really about dot.life in general -- and how our lives have changed because of it. According to a survey conducted by Zogby International, to be released by VeriSign, the operator of .com, in time for today's milestone, 81 percent of Americans visit 5 or more .com sites a day. And many visit more than that.
The growth of .com, it must be noted, did not come quickly. Only five companies followed the footsteps of the Cambridge-based computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc. when it registered the first .com on March 15, 1985. By the late 1980s, about 100 .coms existed, which included now tech powerhouses IBM, Intel, AT&T and Cisco. It wasn't until 12 years later, in 1997, a year after President Clinton signed the landmark 1996 Telecommunications Act, that .com names passed the 1 million mark.
And it's been growing since. So much so, in fact, that back in 1995, VeriSign handled 18 billion queries. These days, VeriSign handles that same amount of queries in 8 hours.
This is an especially big week for the Internet -- where it was just 25 years ago; where it stands now, in our social media-driven world; and where it will be and where it needs to be in future.
Marking dot.com's silver anniversary, VeriSign will host a small, exclusive, day-long policy forum in Washington, D.C. tomorrow, headlined by President Clinton. The dot.com president will deliver a keynote speech on how the Internet has ushered the era of global connectedness -- what we here at HuffPost Tech call the birth of online global citizenship. On the same day, Julius Genachowski, the blog-friendly chairman of the Federal Communication Commission, will release its ambitious and anxiously awaited National Broadband Plan, a comprehensive road-map for bringing fast, affordable high speed Internet access to all Americans. It's high-time we think of our Internet infrastructure in the same way we thought of the Interstate highways in the last century. And on Thursday, the all-important and underrated Sunlight Foundation, which has championed online transparency in government, will launch a national, non-partisan campaign for real-time transparent government.
That's a movement everyone can and will get behind -- as we sit at home and at work, perhaps just on our cell phones, browsing our dot.coms.
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Haiti suffers as we watch, and it will rebuild during our watch. And an emerging online-connected global citizenry -- us -- must be asked to remain engaged in the weeks, months and years ahead.
Jose Antonio Vargas: Top Moments in Tech/Politics of the Decade (PHOTOS)
Irrevocably, politics changed in the past 10 years because of technology in general and the Internet in particular. So here, in no particular order, are the decade's top moments in tech and politics.
Jonathan Spalter: What's Next for the National Broadband Plan?
Today Washington witnessed a rare moment of comity with the release of the National Broadband Plan. Let's step back and appreciate the process that got us to this potentially historic day.
Birju Pandya: The 10 Most Inspiring Videos On The Web
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On Dot-Com's 25th Birthday, a Look Back - DailyFinance
Dot Com Celebrates 25th Birthday - www.htmlgoodies.com
One Happy Birthday Dot Com - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!: Free MP3 Download
I got my first domain name in 1994. I recall quite a bit about it, but I don't remember money, one way or another. I kept notes, though, as it had to do with the foundation of a non-profit. I recall having to provide some kind of proof to get a .org domain name. No Money, You Say...Hmmm...
In 1977 when I first started sending email, I recall that simple usernames were used within the organizational environment and that for external addresses, there were email gateway systems. One had to flag the email to go to ones local email gateway, and then name the user and gateway system of the target. These addresses were more system oriented than the domain names we have today. ...If domain names _were_ available somewhere, they weren't used in any of the handful of environments I was familiar with.
I don't recall when the domain name as we know it today came into use because at the time, my company's internal network had its own nomenclature... Hmmm...
I have a few friends who should really remember the detail. I'll ask.
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There's an old adage everyone should know:
Never write it in electronic form (and especially not an email) if you are not comfortable seeing it as the morning headline.
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And for the whole global economy shrinking, various web searches will quickly show that other countries are quickly developing (amongst other proof the phrase "global economy" is a non-truth). Sorry to digress.
The Chairman of the Bored.
Nope we're going to do more then that. Change is coming.
The first "dot com" was SYMBOLICS.COM March 15 1985
The first .gov was css.gov and was registered in June 1985.
The first .org was mitre.org and was registered in July 1985.
http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/first71.html
/ducksforcover
http://graciouslivingdaybyday.com/
Don't be an ageist, now, we don't need more bigots.
There will always be SOME who don't embrace emerging technologies but it has more to do with the human condition than age; few creatures truly embrace change.
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