I chanced upon a site list­ing the first 100 .com regis­tra­tions ever made — and it rather startled me.  I star­ted my IT career in 1987, first work­ing as a printer oper­ator on the main­frames at ICI, before mov­ing to sys­tems oper­a­tions in at the begin­ning of 1988.  Later in 1988 I became a trainee pro­gram­mer (my career never moved as fast as that first 12 month period!) and so I continued.

So when I took my first tent­at­ive steps in pro­fes­sional IT there had been fewer than 100 .coms registered.  Today there are over 76,000,000 act­ive domains and over 280,000,000 that have been deleted, accord­ing to Domaintools.com.

Things have changed markedly in this industry.  21 years is noth­ing.  The inter­net has quite lit­er­ally exploded around us.  I star­ted surf­ing the World Wide Web in 1993 and frankly there was noth­ing much there.  It was hard to find sites, and per­form­ance was pain­ful.  Run­ning your own site was dif­fi­cult, and it wasn’t until 1996 that I first registered a domain — at-speed.co.uk with the inten­tion of cre­at­ing an online resource for motor­s­port news.  It was a dif­fi­cult but excit­ing exper­i­ence, but I felt that it was too early — the Inter­net wasn’t really a mass mar­ket item yet, even though the poten­tial was start­ing to be real­ised.  I had bug­ger all money at the time too, so needed to go out there and get a bet­ter pay­ing job.  Inter­est­ingly I used to get e-mails from the UK Motor­s­port Index (which still has the same design as it did then!) com­plain­ing about our high budget approach being against the spirit of the web.  I doubt he real­ised that we had abso­lutely no money and every­one con­trib­uted their work for free.  One thing that was as true then as it is now is that good <> expensive.

So now where are we?  We have applic­a­tions delivered via the browser, high per­form­ance search engines that actu­ally work, and we enjoy the power of a huge num­ber of free social ser­vices.  Many of these ser­vices are heav­ily fun­ded and will require mon­et­isa­tion at some point, or they’ll close… that could be inter­est­ing.  Google man­aged the trans­ition from a giveaway to a fee earn­ing ser­vice without ever char­ging the people that made it suc­cess­ful.  Can the likes of flickr, Face­book and WordPress.com?

Time will tell…  What’s cer­tain is that the pace of change, so marked over my career, is prob­ably going to con­tinue accel­er­at­ing.  The next 21 years could be as equally fascinating…

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