Dot-Com: ‘Three Letters and a Punctuation Mark’ That Changed the World
Twenty five years ago, on March 15, 1985, the first commercial dot-com domain name – Symbolics.com – was born. It was one of only six dot-com domain names registered that year (Among the 15 oldest are Northrop.com, Xerox.com, HP.com, IBM.com, Sun.com, Intel.com, TI.com and ATT.com.)
A lot has happened between then and now: the fall of the Berlin wall, the dot com boom and bust, two Gulf wars, Sept. 11, at least one major global economic crisis and the creations of YouTube and Facebook. To give you an impression of the passage of time, REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” had just succeeded “Careless Whisper” by Wham! on the U.S. pop charts.
Today there are more than 80 million websites and the Internet, for many, is nearly as omnipresent as air.
What’s next for the Internet? We posed a few questions to Ken Silva, chief technology officer of VeriSign, which serves as the global registry for .com, .net, .tv, .cc, .name and .jobs domain names.
When was the tipping point for dot-com registrations and what caused it?
A tipping point for .com was in the early- to mid-1990’s with the advent of Internet browsers and consumer PC operating systems. Prior to the mass adoption of these tools by consumers, there was no compelling reason for organizations to have an Internet presence. Browsers had a significant impact as people now had a graphical user interface to view Web content. In addition, operating systems such as Windows 95 had built-in TCP/IP functionality for the user, making it much easier to access the Internet.
Looking back at the last 25 years, what are the most impressive changes the Internet has brought about?
Comcast super-fast Internet: More speed, less cash?
Comcast is cutting the price of its super fast 50 megabits Internet access service to $116.95 a month in most markets, less than year after launching the service at $139.95.
In fact, now that Comcast has started bundling the service with its phone and video services, subscribers will be able to get the so-called ‘Wideband’ even cheaper that $116.95. Wideband will effectively be priced at $99.95 if it is bought with one of those other services from the largest U.S. cable operator.
The new pricing strategy kicks off nationally on June 15.
Comcast has been aggressively rolling out its version of the wideband cable technology and says it now reaches around a third of the homes its systems pass in the United States.
Many Wall Street analysts think super-fast Internet access could be the killer app for cable companies rather than their traditional dominance in video. The cable operators meanwhile are concerned that programmers are giving away TV shows for free on Hulu and other websites. Their key concern is the fear of ‘cord-cutting,’ meaning that many users will end up canceling their cable TV service.
But the analysts point out that cable operators will continue to have some leverage as they’re well positioned to offer the kinds of Internet speeds that subscribers will need to deliver high-definition video pictures.
Guys, don’t complain. I’m spending over NZD $120 a month to have supposedly 24/0.8mbps internet (but i live very close to the exchange and get 12mbps max)with 30gb limit with a phone line. I constantly get disconnected or it becomes very (i mean very, sometimes worse than a dial-up connection) slow at ‘high traffic’ times. I almost never get continuous streaming for a Youtube clip (have to wait a while to load it).
It’s sad that one of the oldest domain names is going to vanish: sun.com. As a 13+ year employee I was really bummed when you go to sun.com and it redirects you to oracle.com. Godspeed former Sun comrades, I hope you survive the merger.