JuliannaThe BBC recently posted an article about the first .COM registration way back in 1985. To put this in perspective, 1985 was the same year ‘Back to the Future’ was released.
The first .COM domains registered were:
1. 15-March-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM (Their Wikipedia page is a great snapshot of the era.)
2. 24-April-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-July-1985 MCC.COM
(The first .CA registration was completed on January 12, 1988 and the very first registration was upei.ca for the University of Prince Edward Island.)
It made me wonder, what was the Internet like back then?
Now granted I am a PC user, who is slowly getting pulled by the modern sleekness of Apple products, but most of my experience in on PC/Windows. I can remember using Windows 3.1, in the 90’s, and I had a beat up old second hand computer yellowed by dust and the last owner’s cigarette smoke. I didn’t even have Internet on it, although I was told it could do Email. All I cared about were the wonderful pixelated games!
The Internet itself is said to have been born in 1980, and the first web browser to be released in 1993, in Illinois USA, was called Mosaic.
Then Internet Explorer arrived in 1995.
So how did people use their domains in 1985?
I couldn’t find any screenshots of this at all, so I asked John Demco, co-founder of Webnames.ca and the man who created .CA for Canada. As John explained it, when this all started people didn’t have webpages, they mostly used the domain name itself for email, remote login, FTP usage, and FTP listing. Many people still use domains exclusively those reasons.
The Internet is relatively young (younger than I am!), yet nowadays we expect so much from it. When I can’t find a wireless connection for my iPod touch it’s like a dead robot to me. The Internet gives it life. We put so much energy into making the Internet dazzle and perform magic tricks to make us oooooh and awwww!
Will the Internet have a midlife crisis? It turned 40 last year and some say it already has hit midlife as evidenced by of its growing of security concerns and legal barriers. The Internet wants to be everything, or does it? Wherever it ends up, today my awe comes from looking back at the path it took to get here!