Last week, on March 15, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the dot-com domain name. CNN tells us that on March 15, 1985, the first dot-com domain name - Symbolics.com - appeared on the Internet, ushering in the commercial age of the World Wide Web. Once it became simpler to access a website this way, the first 100 sites were up and running in two years, and by 1995, there were 18,000. Now the internet has grown, with internet speed, to more than 80 million dot-com domain names, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF).
Now, the “@” symbol, (who celebrates it’s 474th anniversary on May 4), has been officially admitted to the architecture and design collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. From it’s murky original usage for inventory, and then more recently in accounting (when it was added to typewriter keyboards), one man took a symbol that was so seldom used that it was open to reinterpretation and made it part of an internet e-mail address.
By giving that once obscure accountancy symbol a new application without distorting its original meaning, that man, Raymond Tomlinson, was deemed to have checked all of MoMA’s boxes in terms of form, function, values, cultural impact and innovation. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA sees the fact that it has so many nicknames around the world as proof of its importance, because we care so much about the @ that we’ve started to mythologize it.
The French and Italians have nicknamed it the “snail,” the Norwegians call it a “pig’s tail,” the Germans “monkey’s tail,” and the Chinese “little mouse.” The Russians think of it as a dog, and the Finns as a slumbering cat.
Tags: Internet Speed