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Happy Birthday, Dear DNS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-than-most-tlas dept.

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..."

1 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Using the Internet before DNS by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.