Happy Birthday, Dear DNS

Shloka writes with a snippet from Wired News: "Twenty years ago Monday, two computer scientists at the University of Southern California created a key component essential to the modern Internet. Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris ran the first successful test of the automated domain name system, or DNS..."

Comments

[OT] idea for a 'new? domain naming concep

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be kind of like palm graffiti where each "shape", that you
draw in the silkscreen, is registered as a character.

You would have a little panel like a "silkscreen" in the navigation bar
on your web browser.

To get to a particular website you would only need a input device to
draw symbol on the "silkscreen". If you wanted to go to the website for
Target (http://www.target.com.au/) you just draw a picture of a circle
with a solid dot in the middle. To get to the main website for the
Debian project (http://www.debian.org/) you draw the Debian Swirl
(http://www.debian.org/logos/openlogo-nd-50 .png)

Get this. There is a DNS-like naming system for these and there are
central registries.

When you want to use a particular "shape" for your IP you must register
just like you would a domain name.

You could also use this in corporate LANs' where users could use a input
device to draw a character on the silkscreen when they needed to access
a particular machine. This could speed-up and and simplify choosing
which domain to log into if they need to choose from a significant
number of them.

The advantages for this as "domain name like" usage are ten fold when
you consider globalisation, continued international technical
development and last but not least the introduction of IPv6.

People all around the world, regardless of language, will be able to
access a website by just drawing its symbol.Businesses will love this
and race to register their logos and trademarks.

I do not recommend allowing people to define their own symbols or even
have them predefined by local software as I have seen already.
(http://www.sensiva.com/symbolcommander/ )

This will ensure that you can go to any computer and draw the same
symbol to access the same website.

Please tell me if this exists already!

regards,

Chris Caston
This e-mail is released under terms of the design science license:
(http://www.dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt)

Using the Internet before DNS

[Animats]

I remember the old days, when you had to download the HOSTS.TXT file from SRI-NIC, using anonymous FTP. Adding a host required talking to people at SRI. Name propagation took months, because many sites didn't update their HOSTS.TXT site frequently. (Parts of the MILNET still work that way, for security reasons.)

ARPANET IMP addresses were orignally 8 bits. They were expanded from 8 to 16 bits in the late 1970s, but some sites didn't upgrade their software and only talked to host numbers below 256. So having a low host number (1..255) meant something.

I got the fifth Class B IP block (128.5.xxx.xxx) for Ford, and that was being nice - we probably could have gotten a class A. BBN had four class A blocks back then.

And there was no spam. Not ever.

Re:Using the Internet before DNS

[HiKarma]

No spam ever? That even predates DNS.

See This Slashdot story

Re:Using the Internet before DNS

[stanwirth]

Well I used to update our /etc/hosts (in Unix, we don't use the suffix -- you must have been on one of them VMS machines, calling it HOSTS.TXT!) every friday without fail-- but then, campus networking would do the (long, slow) download from sri.nic.arpa for the benefit for the rest of the sysadmins, plus you could get just a patch and apply the diffs -- so it wasn't that big a deal to get it over the network, no hours of babysitting an FTP link back to the mothership SRI. Sort of like the way DNS actually works now -- like a phone tree.

I figured they got the idea of how to set up the DNS distributed hierarchical database bits by studying the pattern of how people actually distributed their hosts files -- and wouldn't it be nice if they'd only have to distribute the changes: just like sending out weekly patches. Plus ca change, plus ca change pas.

When we got ahold of the first alpha and beta versions of BIND in the mid-80's, downloading the hosts table was still preferable because there were just too many bugs in BIND at that stage. It's kind of annoying that so little stuff is set up to fall back to the hosts tables properly anymore.

Re:Modern world

[cperciva]

Servers move far more frequently than people do. I've had the same phone number for 22 years now; if slashdot.org used the same IP address for 22 years, I might start to access it without using DNS.

Re:Modern world

[Zarhan]

I don't know, but I would assume that even in the US you can get the same things as here in Finland - electronic phonebooks, available online in the web, on CD-ROM, or accessible via SMS (Just type in FIND [address] [hometown] and send it to number 15400, you'll get the number in reply. When using my company phone and need something (such as a taxi when I'm on business trip), I usually just dial to a phonebook service and ask them to connect me directly.

So, we're hardly limited to a once-a-year updated books...

it's called LDAP

[axxackall]

I know, LDAP is designed to host and distribute personal user acount info, while you want LDAP for everyone, not only computer users. But the problem is that outside of computer industry itself computer information services are either expensive or useless.

Twenty years is not really a long time interval to change our social life revolutionary. Although, it was in last 20 years that Internet have become a part of our life. Or have it?

Most of information services in Internet are about other Internet informational services or about Internet technologies. No wonder: when it is growing on shoulders of Internet enthusiasts they publish what they know. And the best they know is Internet itself.

The picture was going to change with B2C, but the boom has collapsed saddenly, and then all investors have frozen their money waiting when Mr. President will finally all his wars he's planned. I guess once he's doneand investors are back then B2C will take it's second chance and then we'll finally see more and more infomration services about resources directly not related to internet nor to computer industry.

Another factor is that ma-bells in their core services are far from being "internetized". They might still afraid Internet after ATT was hacked famously in eary 1980s. I worked in ATT. I remember that Internet is prohibitted for all workstations (exception: http proxy for some of them). It's just an illustration of paranoid anti-internet environment there.

Another factor is the modern anti-spam trend - people afraid spam and telemarketing and they don't want to publish their personal info like phone numbers and email addresses. I guess until there will be a law (international, as domestic laws do not protect such international thing as Internet) protecting from spam and from telemarketing, until then people will not let their info being published.

Conclusion: let Mr. Bush finish his wars and investors to re-animate B2C, let ma-bells leave their paranoid fears of Internet, let the law protect people from the spam - and you'll be able to use LDAP to find you friends even if they are not connected to Internet.

Re:Celebrate...

[tvm662]

According to this page the copyright is owned by a company that is now part of AOL Time Warner and it brings in two million dollars every year in royalties.

Tom.

DNS is not a locator service

[IGnatius T Foobar]

DNS is not a locator service, but unfortunately people treat it as if it were one. They think "ok, I want to find the web site for XYZ Corporation, so all I have to do is just prepend WWW to the name and append COM and it'll be there." This line of thinking is what has created all of the fighting that goes on over domain names -- the reason we seem to treat domain names as if they were real estate. A true locator service would have a number of fields you could fill out to tell it what you're looking for, and it would find it for you. Perhaps it would simply find the domain name, which in turn would find the IP address.

It's not going to happen now, though. At least not using the IETF standards process. Back when DNS was invented, people knew how to participate -- the result is things like DNS, and SMTP, where everyone talks to everyone else. Now that the corporateheads have taken over, everything gets invented in lawyerspace, where standards take a back seat to money (or at least some corporate idiot's dream of making lots of money by owning a choke point) and you have horrid nonstandard systems that don't talk to each other (like the various independent instant messaging systems).

Oh well.

Re:DNS is not a locator service

[kju]

I would rather type in www..com and be right, than using a lookup service. It is much more overhead to type in these informations, and the resultings urls might be difficult to remember (think ibm would probably be under ibm-computer.com, because some other used ibm.com first. In a locator service one would argue, that the real domainname won't matter (and thus won't be fight over) and therefour "real" ibm should have no problem in not having ibm.com. Do you really want this?

This would mean, we all would have to use a locator lookup service as requirement. This would really slow down my everyday work and fun. No more www.slashdot.org, now i must enter USA -> Computers -> Culture -> Nerds -> slashdot. Yes, thats what i ever wanted. 5 Minutes for each URL i want to open.
If you really think, that you wan't to do something like a lookup, use google. enter companyname and maybe some other criteria, and nearly sure as hell will be your wanted site under the first four links, if not even on first position. So, there is your locator service. No need to change the domain name system.