First registered website hits 25th birthday

15 March 2010 14:48 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Light the candles and clear your throat, for we're about to sing happy birthday to Symbolics.com, the very first domain to be registered on the Web, on 15 March 1985. Despite the computer manufacturer being long-gone, the website hosted by the company is still online at symbolics-dks.com instead.

Despite its age, it still doesn't look too bad. There's hyperlinks and an email address, but if you want to take advantage of the special offer listed on the page then you'll have to mail payment and proof of purchase to a postal address. Another five websites were registered that year, but by the time the dot-com boom came around in 1997, there were 1 million.

Today, more than 668,000 .com addresses are registered every month, with the number of other domains registered even larger. With an estimated web population of about 1.7 billion, that number's only going to go up and up. We wonder if Symbolics realised what it was signing up to, back in 1985...

Via: news.bbc.co.uk

Full tags

Software, Websites, Online, Symbolics, domain names