Sunday (March 15) will mark the 30th anniversary of the first domain name ever registered - Symbolics.com. Since that day back in 1985 more than 284 million domains have been registered in a variety of extensions. That first year only nine TLDs existed - the familiar .com, .net and .org extensions, along with .edu, .gov, .mil and three ccTLDs - .us, .uk and .il (representing the United States, United Kingdom and Israel). With the explosion of new gTLDs released over the past year, more than 800 extensions have been birthed with hundreds more on the way.

To mark this special anniversary and illustrate just how much things have changed over the past three decades, the European Domain Centre has produced a very cool free infographic that shows every domain extension introduced since 1985  and the year in which each TLD was released. If you would like a print copy of the infographic they will send you an A3 sized poster version at no charge if you sign up for their free newsletter.

Domain cube image from Bigstock

European Domain Centre Founder and Managing Partner Christopher Hofman Laursen estimates his team spent more than 50 hours producing their visual map of the TLD universe. With hundreds of additional TLDs in the pipeline, their next update will undoubtedly require a major time investment as well. In commentary about the new infographic Uniregistry Founder Frank Schilling, whose company has introduced several new gTLDs, noted, "You're going to need a bigger chart for round 2!"