In a relatively short time, the dot-com revolution has "woven itself into every nook and cranny of the commercial world," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, a Washington think tank that studies the social impacts of the Internet. "It usually takes technologies a lot longer to insinuate themselves into the basic rhythms of people's lives."

But there was hardly a ripple when Symbolics Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of computer systems and software based on research done at MIT, signed up the first .com with Network Solutions, the domain registration firm that was acquired by VeriSign in 2000.

[...]

Rainie said Symbolics.com signaled the entry of an entrepreneurial spirit to a nascent online world dominated by a "libertarian leftist" class that saw the Internet as a way to "democratize power" and circumvent big powerful institutions like government and big business.

Internet historians believe the Internet would have evolved "very differently if commercial interests had not asserted themselves, particularly at the dawn of the Web, but even in the pre-Web period," Rainie said.