i'm not sure what constitutes the first "successful" ICO but NXT ran one in september 2013. it was fairly groundbreaking at the time and probably inspired the ethereum developers to launch theirs.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=303898.0I don't really like CFTC's sorting of the coins, I think bitcoin needs to be in its own section, but what you are saying does make sense.
the commodity designation is a good thing---it implies fungibility.
fungibility? A coin is only fungible if the transactions cannot be connected or traced together which can only be a product of anonymous and private transactions.