I am born in 1999, I remember having to write “www.” before my website in the address bar otherwise it would not work. Later in elementary school it no longer needed to be done to access the website. What happened?
In: Technology
In the early days of the Internet, it wasn’t so clear yet, what everyone was going to use it for. Around the end of the 90s/start of the 00s, it was starting to become pretty clear that web browsers and web pages were going to be how most people and businesses used the internet, most of the time.
If you’re going to run an internet domain, there are a bunch of different services you can host on it though. You can host a web page, an email server, an FTP server, a Gopher server, or countless other things. Traditionally, you would host each of these things on a separate subdomain of your main domain: www.something.com for your website, ftp.something.com for file transfers, mail.something.com for an SMTP server, and stuff like that. And sometimes, each of those services would be hosted by a different physical server on a different IP address. Often there would be a forwarder so that if you went to something.com you would be bounced to www.something.com, but that was an extra step to set up.
As things developed (and as the IPv4 address pool dried up), it became much more common to use virtual hosting, reverse-proxies and similar systems so all these services would appear to be hosted on a single system, which makes it simpler to just create a something.com domain and host all the services on that one address.
Businesses were also starting to decide arpound the same time that leaving the “www” out of their website domain made for better branding.
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