From the BBC:
The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15 March - the 25th birthday of the day the first dotcom name was registered.
In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in dotcom.
That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.
It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered.
"This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet," said Mark Mclaughlin, chief executive officer of Verisign the company that is responsible for looking after the dotcom domain.
"Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event," he said.
Commercialisation
For most of the late 1980s and early 1990s hardly anyone knew what a dotcom was.
The need for some sort of organising principles became apparent as more bodies connected into the fledgling internet but there is confusion as to the exact genesis of dotcom.
It is unlikely that the early dotcoms were thought of as businesses as the early internet was not seen as a place for commerce but rather as a platform for governmental and educational bodies to trade ideas.
Scholars generally agree that a turning point was the introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape that brought mainstream consumers on to the web.
...By 2020 the internet should add $3.8 trillion (
