The name .net

Actually, .NET is many things, but primarily it's a marketing term for a set of products and technologies that Microsoft is creating to move personal and enterprise computing beyond the PC desktop and into a distributed Internet-based environment. So .NET--which was originally called Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS)--is also a platform, one that Microsoft sees as the successor to Windows. 


.NET is natural for Microsoft marketing to emphasis on the "Network"-ing aspect of its technologies and reacted to the marketing blitz by Sun Micro System in the late 1990 where the theme was "Network is the computer". The term "Dot-Com" was synonymous with the Internet that time, and "Dot-NET" was a play to that word.


On 15 March 1985 the first Internet dot.com domain name was registered by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A domain name is a component of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) used to access web sites, for example:

URL: http://www.example.net/index.html

Top-level domain name: .net

Second-level domain name: example.net

Host name: www.example.net