Dot Com is Twenty Five Years Old

The very first site registered with a dot com Internet address was twenty five years ago – to be precise it was on 15^th March 1985 allotted to symbolic.com. That company is now defunct but the development of dot com since that date is unbelievable. As against six domain names registered in 1985 (entire year) we now have about 668000 .com sites registered every month! In 1997, one million .com domains were registered and with several millions coming up in 2000, the bubble busted. Though there are twenty Top Level Domain Names to be chosen .com is still in great demand as it has become synonymous with web.

The web didn't really start until Christmas day 1990 –There were about a dozen web sites world wide. Mosaic the first graphic browser didn't get released until February of 93. Prior to the web, Internet was still there. Popular Services prior to the WWW were: Electronic Mail, Usenet News groups, ftp, telnet and Gopher. In India, Scientific Research institutions under CSIR had email facility through ERNET in 1986. Some universities were fortunate to be connected through ERNET. Usenet was then very popular.

In 1993 I remember accessing text based web servers through a dedicated line from Hyderabad to New Jersey . I was then in Satyam Computers, the first private company in India to acquire a 64kbps dedicated link for connecting to US Clients. In fact, Satyam was refused such a high speed link by VSNL who said: "When we are having one 64 Kbps for the entire country, what will you – a single company that too in private sector – do with that high capacity bandwidth all by yourself?" It took almost a year to convince the bureaucracy. The very next year, twelve 64 KBPs lines were applied for by others and they got it.

I used a command line based web browser (text only) that was actually called www! BSNL – the only ISP then – charged higher fees for accessing graphical web servers. We could read about graphical web sites only in foreign magazines. Satyam was the first company to offer training programs in learning Internet!

Thinking of the progress this web has made, it is mind boggling. There is no parallel to the impact it has created. We are all fortunate to be living at this point of time where all types of technologies are getting converged. Let us hope future will be brighter.