25 YEARS OF DOT-COMS
1985 Symbolics became the first company to register as a dot-com, on March 15. The domain survives today, but the Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer failed to keep up with the evolution of the PC industry. Of the six dot-coms registered in its first year, only one was not involved in computing: defence contractor Northrop. 1990 Barely a few hundred dot-coms were registered during the 1980s, but after Tim Berners-Lee put up the first website in 1990 (info.cern.ch) from his base at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the concept took off. 1995 The flotation of Netscape ushered in a dot-com boom, after its value rose to $2.8 billion in one day. A year later, while the PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin were busy working on the nascent Google, Yahoo!’s share price tripled on its first day of trading. 2000 Two months after AOL.com acquired Time Warner in a $164 billion deal, the dot-com boom reached its zenith on March 10. Nine weeks later, the fashion webs