Today it’s hard to imagine the internet without domain names — they make the online world understandable to people. Instead of long numeric IP addresses, we type familiar site names like google.com, wikipedia.org, or facebook.com. But there was a time when none of this existed. In the early 1980s, the internet was mostly an academic network where computers communicated using numbers, and no one imagined that one day those numbers would turn into millions of website names. Everything changed in 1985, when the first-ever .com domain was registered.
