Dot Com Turns 25 Today

March 15, as it happens, is the 25th birthday of the revolutionary dot.com, writes Jose Antonio Vargas in a Huffington Post blog post.

Imagine business, technology and innovation without .com, news, media and government without it, YouTube and Facebook and Twitter 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.

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.