The history of the Internet with 6 Gifs

Just thirty years ago, on 15 March 1985, the first .com domain name was registeredsymbolics.com) from the company technologys Symbolics, effectively marking the birth of the commercial Internet. But domain names started to catch on in the 1990s.

1985. Back to the Future was released in US theaters and ended up being the highest grossing film of the year. Studio Ghibli, the world famous Japanese animation studio, was founded. The Amiga personal computers were released. Super Mario Bros. was released. Steve Jobs left Apple. Space Shuttle Atlantis made its maiden flight flight. The first Nintendo consoles were released in the US.

Despite all these great cultural, technological, and scientific developments, the Internet, as we know it today, started to build much more slowly, with only six .com domain names registered in 1985. The next decade brought the real revolution after the millionth domain name .com was registered with 1997.

Do you remember those years? When Netscape Navigator was the most popular program browsing on the Internet? The following GIFs were created by The Open University based on the archived pages by Internet Archive Wayback Machine.