Story highlights The first .com domain was registered on March 15, 1985

It was owned by a tech company that later went bankrupt, natch

(CNN) There's a bit of video that goes around the Internet every so often, showing a couple of clueless 1990s television hosts trying to decipher the mysteries of the Internet.

"What is Internet, anyway?" NBC "Today" show host Bryant Gumbel asks in the 1994 clip after stumbling through an email address that ends in the now-famous .com suffix, as if it's written in some alien language.

How far we've come.

Thirty years ago, the .com Internet domain was born. In case you're not familiar, the companies and organizations that hand out Internet addresses use top-level domains like .com to organize the addresses. There's .gov for government, .edu for education, .mil for the military and .org for organizations. Addresses that end in .com can be registered by anyone, although the suffix stands for "commercial."

Although other domains predate it, officially at least, .com is the one that got the whole online party going, launched the careers of countless millionaires, radically reformed our economy and wormed its way into our everyday language and lives.

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