The internet's dotcom domain turned 25 on Monday.
It's strange to think that by 1992 there were still less than 15,000 .com domains registered. The million mark wasn't reached until 1997 and today it is 80 mIllion and growing.
First ever dotcom: Symbolics.com
The word dotcom is a child of the Nineties - after all, the dotcom craziness happened then - but it may surprise you to know that the first ever dotcom site was registered on 15 March 1985.
Symbolics was originally a computer manufacturer but declared bankruptcy and went out of business in the early Nineties. The current Symbolics.com is under new ownership and is simply used as a way to get traffic for website XF.com Investments.
Most successful dotcom: Amazon.com
When Jeff Bezos started an online bookselling business, Amazon.com, in 1995 from his garage, little did he realise the huge potential and eventual global success of what is now one of the most popular (if not the most popular) e-commerce sites on the web today, selling not just books but electronics, digital downloads, homewares and more.
One of the initial innovations that made Amazon so successful was the combination of user reviews and the recommendation engine that suggested new products to you based on things you had either bought from Amazon or had recently browsed through.
Most famous dotcom failure: Boo.com
The year was 2000. Boo.com had been launched the previous November, propelled forward by funding of about US$125m with investors including Benetton. A fashion e-tailer, Boo's delayed launch resulted in a vast waste of money as stock once fashionable was now no longer commercially viable.
More woes for Boo: visitors found the site slow and irritating - it didn't catch on. Money pumped into the website at the height of the dotcom boom was being lost fast and with reports of lack of management and overspending, Boo.com eventually went into liquidation, having already spent US$380m.
However, the legacy of Boo's dotcom debauchery didn't scare everyone away; Irish internet entrepreneur Ray Nolan, co-founder of Web Reservations International, bought the domain and turned it into a social-networking travel site.
Best post-boom dotcom: YouTube.com
How lucky was YouTube to have completely bypassed the dotcom bubble? These guys only registered in 2005 and alongside now owner Google, the YouTube site is one of the most famous and visited destinations on the web.
Highest accessed dotcom: Google.com
Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP).
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The home page was still marked "BETA".
Today, google.com serves 4 billion searches everyday with more than 4,50,000 servers located all around the world.