March 15, 1985, was a day that will never be forgotten for the IT industry– The day when the first “.com” domain was registered.

From the very beginning, its name is derived from the word commercial, indicating its original intended purpose for domains registered by commercial organizations. Later, the domain opened for general purposes. The name of the first registered domain on the Internet was “Symbolics.com” which is a computer systems company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shortly after that, in the same year, there have been 5 more “.com” domains including BBN.com, think.com, MCC.com, DEC.com, northrop.com.

Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of the Internet Domain Name System

In fact, the “.com” part of one domain is called the top-level domain (TLD). But do you know who actually invented the domain name system?

Well, back in 1983 Paul Mockapetris, an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, expanded the Internet beyond its academic origins by inventing the Domain Name System (DNS).

There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered. Of these, roughly 1/3 are in use (businesses, personal websites, email, etc.), another 1/3 appear to be unused, and the last 1/3 are used for a variety of speculative purposes.

The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.