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\begin{document}

\date{28 March 2010}


\title{HOST TABLES, TOP LEVEL DOMAIN NAMES AND THE ORIGIN OF DOT COM}


\author{Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler%
\thanks{Retired Director of the SRI Network Information Systems Center And
PI of the NIC project 1974-1989}}

\maketitle
>From as far back as 1971 the Arpanet Network Information Center (NIC)
at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International or SRI), located
in Menlo Park, California, maintained the Arpanet Host Table., This
work was carried out under contract to the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA). Later the same activity was carried out by
the NIC for the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) and the Defense
Data Network (DDN), of which the Arpanet eventually became one segment.

Before the NIC officially maintained the Host Table, Bolt Beranek
and Newman Inc. (BBN) located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was under
contract to DARPA to provide and manage the Arpanet Interface Message
Processors (IMPs), and to provide the Arpanet Network Operations Center
(NOC). BBN would assign a new host an IMP port number, and often ask
the site attaching the host computer to the IMP, what name they would
like to be called. Ellen Westheimer at BBN published a descriptive
list called first, the Site Status list (1), and later, the Network
Host Status list (2), that listed what BBN thought was attached to
each IMP. In 1971 Peggy Karp at Mitre Corporation, Bedford, Massachussetts,
suggested a standard format for a host table. (3,4). This led to a
discussion which finally resulted in the NIC being designated the
official host name registry for the Arpanet (5, 6). At first the Host
Table was not machine readable (7) and tended to be adapted by each
site to suit its machine types. Peter Deutsch at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center (Xerox-PARC) suggested that the Host Table be standardized
and made machine readable (8). The NIC proceeded to define an online,
machine-readable standard for the Host Table in March 1974 (9).

BBN would forward Imp port information to the NIC. The NIC would contact
the site for other information needed for the Host Table, would verify
that the name chosen was not already in use, and that it met network
guidelines. At the same time we would request the name of a technical
representative at the site, who would act as Technical Liaison. The
NIC was also authorized by DARPA to coordinate and maintain the list
of Technical Liaisons (10) . The Liaison was the contact for any problems
with the attached host, and was the point of contact for network maintenance,
upgrades, important information affecting hosts, and the like. There
was only one Liaison per host, but a person could serve as Liaison
for more than one host.

In September 1974 Jonathan (Jon) Postel joined the Augmentation Research
Center (SRI-ARC) at SRI in Menlo Park, CA. This was the SRI Center
that, at the time, was providing the NIC for the Arpanet. Part of
Jon's DARPA contract activity at SRI was to serve as a member of the
Network Working Group (NWG). The Arpanet was still in its early stages
of evolution. Many technical decisions came from the NWG and were
usually issued as technical notes called Requests for Comments or
RFCs. The NIC was the official repository for the RFCs (10), and Jon
had become the unofficial editor of them. In 1972 Jon and Vinton Cerf,
when both of them were at the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA), issued an RFC entitled Well Known Socket Numbers (11) After
Jon joined SRI in 1974, he continued publishing updates to this list
as needed. This list eventually evolved into the Assigned Numbers
list (12) and continued to be maintained and updated by Jon. The Host
Table, however, was maintained by me and others at the NIC. Each list
handled aspects of naming. However, both activities at that time were
taking place in one SRI group under one DARPA contract, so this wasn't
a problem.

In July 1975 operational management of the Arpanet was turned over
to the Defense Communications Agency (DCA), whose role it was to manage
operational military communications networks (13). DARPA still maintained
administrative control over the Arpanet and funded its research programs.
It was just no longer responsible for the day-to-day operation of
the Arpanet. At that time the SRI NIC and the BBN NOC contracts were
issued and managed by DCA rather than DARPA.

In 1977 Jon left SRI to join the University of Southern California's
Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) in Marina del Rey, CA. By
this time both the Assigned Numbers list and the Host Table had grown
significantly. Jon was funded by DARPA, whereas the NIC, of which
I was then the principal investigator (PI), was funded by DCA. Jon
and his assistant, Joyce Reynolds, continued to manage the Assigned
Numbers list that was now at USC-ISI, while the NIC at SRI managed
the Host Table. Jon also administered the country code, .us domain,
global IP address allocation, and root zone management for the experimental
doman naming system (DNS); and became the formal editor of the RFCs.
Meanwhile the Host Table at the NIC was evolving into the DNS registry.
This created a somewhat arbitrary split in naming, so in 1987 (14)
administration of the Assigned Numbers, global IP address allocation,
and root zone management were transferred to the NIC contract. At
that point the NIC became the naming and addressing registration authority
for the Arpanet/DDN internet. This work was managed for the NIC first
by Task Leader Mary Stahl, and later by Sue Romano Kirkpatrick. To
try to keep everything in synch, I included Jon as a consultant on
the NIC contract to cover his many trips and meetings with SRI. I
include all this contractual detail here, because it created a lot
of confusion as to who was maintaining what. Most work on the Arpanet/DDN
was a joint effort of many individuals and organizations, and this
was certainly true of naming and addressing.

The Host Table was for many years a centralized ``flat'' ASCII text
file that hosts downloaded from the NI, first via FTP, and later via
the NIC Name Server (15, 16, 17). However, the Host Table continued
to grow until the host addresses were about to exceed the address
space allotted to them in the packet headers, and the table itself
was too large for small hosts to house in its entirety. Aside from
its size, maintenance of a single, centralized Host Table had become
cumbersome and inefficient, and did not serve the needs of the expanding
internet.

There was extensive discussion of a new, heirarchical approach to
naming and addressing in both the RFCs and the IENs. These discussions
are too numerous to cite here. and are included in many RFCs, which
see (18). Also, Mike Karels. then at the University of California
at Berkeley, developed the UNIX-based BIND implementation of the DNS.
He worked closely with Jon and Paul and the NIC. I will let him and
others who were associated with that implementation, tell the naming
and addressing story from their perspective.

USC-ISI led the effort to come up with a new hierarchical domain naming
scheme. The domain naming system (DNS) that was ultimately adopted,
was developed by Paul Mockapetris, who worked in Jon's group at USC-ISI
at the time. Paul submitted a draft RFC of ideas for a DNS to the
Namedroppers working group, of which Jon was the coordinator. The
main concept of the DNS was that it was an hierarchical system, and
it was distributed in its data capture and maintenance, as well as
in its administration. It uncoupled names from addresses, and could
be applied to different networks with different protocol suites. It
also provided improved capabilities for mail relaying. After much
discussion, the draft DNS was published in November 1983 as two final
RFCs - 882 and 883 (19, 20). These RFCs were later revised in 1987
(21.22).

However, as mentioned above, the Host Table and host name server for
the Arpanet/DDN internet were provided by the NIC, and host name registration
was administered by the NIC; therefore, it was imperative that the
NIC implement the new domain naming scheme. The NIC DNS implementation
was done by Ken Harrenstien and David Roode at SRI.

In general the design, proof of concept, and initial development of
the DNS were funded by DARPA, and this effort was led by USC-ISI;
whereas, the top level domain (TLD) registration and DNS implementation
and administration for the Arpanet/DDN internet were funded by DCA
and carried out by the NIC. The NIC served as the first TLD Registrar
and administered all the TLDs at the beginning. However, SRI, USC-ISI,
DARPA, DCA, NSF, the NWG, the IETF, the Technical Liaisons, the Domain
Technical Contacts, and the Namedroppers working group all worked
very closely together as a collaborative team to orchestrate the changeover
from the old naming system to the new DNS.

The transition from the ``flat'' ASCII text Host Table to the hierarchical
DNS took place in stages over time. The Arpanet transition first began
in 1983 (23,24, 25). Later in 1987-88 the DDN finally made its transition
to the DNS (26, 27.) During the transition the NIC maintained two
host tables -- the old and the new. It also updated the Name Server
and naming database to handle old or new requests, and wrote the Domain
Administrators Operations Guide (28, 29, 30, 31).

Early in the cutover to the DNS, a joint decision was made by DARPA
and DCA to add the domain name, .arpa, to the end of every existing
host name in the Host Table as a test domain to try out the new hierarchical
concept. (23,24, 25). However, several sites were not particularly
happy to have .arpa as part of their host name, as they had no direct
association with that agency. Consequently, the NIC and DCA received
many calls and complaints. Also, once it was announced that~there
would be an hierarchical domain naming system, the NIC was approached
by people insisting that their~organization or agency should be awarded
a top-level domain name or TLD.

DCA was leaning toward making the DDN a TLD, and changing all DDN
network names from .arpa to .mil to better depict the military community.
I could forsee real problems if actual organizations were chosen as
TLDs In my opinion this could have opened a can of worms as to who
or what got to be a TLD. Although the Arpanet/DDN was a military network,
many hosts on it were not military in nature, nor were they located
at military sites. Adding .mil to their names would have been as unpopular
and confusing as .arpa had been. Also the DNS naming scheme was designed
to reach out to other domains that were government, but not military,
e.g. NSF.

Therefore, I wrote an email memo (32) to (and had further discussions
with) Thomas (Tom) Harris, the technical lead at the DCA Program Management
Office (PMO) at the time, suggesting that the TLDs be generic categories
of which .mil would be one, but that others such as .edu, .gov, .org,
and .com be added. The idea was that anyone wanting a host name would
have to choose the generic TLD that he or she thought best suited
the organization behind the name. The community under each TLD would
then be free to structure its name space to suit its members, i.e.,
the name space for .mil might have a very different hierarchical structure
than the name space for .edu, and so on. Tom Harris agreed with this
approach and approved it. We provided the list of TLDs to Jon at a
meeting at SRI in late 1982 (33), and they were also discussed in
the Namedroppes working group, and then published in RFC 920 (34)
along with a revised schedule for the DNS cutover (35).

I was also concerned then about another possible problem that favored
a generic naming scheme. DARPA was acting as a de facto standards
body for the Internet; however, it was not recognized as a legitimate
standards body at the time. Some of the existing official standards
bodies felt that they should be the ones setting the naming and addressing
standards. The generic scheme. which reflected the various communities
on the internet, lent itself to being taken over later by the standards
bodies of those communities, should that be the decision made further
down the line. The idea was that NSF or EDUCOM could have administered
the .edu domain, NBS could have administered the .gov domain, the
military Protocol Standards Steering Group (PSSG) could have administered
the .mil domain, ANSI could have administered the .com domain, and
so on.

Meanwhile, a lot was happening at DCA. Unfortunately Tom Harris died
of a sudden heart attack. The Autodin II project was cancelled. The
agency was being reorganized, and many people were coming and going.
The NIC was trying to proceed with the game plan agreed upon with
Tom Harris and the NWG. However, I was now being told to take direction
only from DCA, not the NWG. Many of the new people were not familiar
with the style of doing things on the network. Some considered the
DNS experimental, so not appropriate for an operational military network.
Others thought the international OSI protocols would prevail. Still
others had just transferred in from somewhere else, and barely knew
what host tables and name servers were. I was asked to justify why
Jon was a consultant on the NIC contract. DCA was even being advised
to classify the host table!

Jon and DARPA were trying to move forward with the DNS work, and the
NIC was becoming a bottleneck. I was caught between the proverbial
rock and a hard place. There were indications that DCA might decide
to bypass the NWG work and start a parallel effort. About this time
Michael (Mike) Corrigan became the technical lead at DCA. Jon and
I decided we needed to have a joint meeting to try to bring all the
factions together. This meeting was held in Washington in 1985 I believe.
I can't remember all the participants, but I recall that Jon, myself,
Ken Harrenstien, Noel Chiappa, Mike Corrigan, some representatives
from BBN, and others were there -- maybe about 10 or 12 people.

There is an amusing anecdote associated with that meeting. Ken Harrenstien,
the NIC software architect, usually dressed casually in tee shirts
and running shoes. This was an important meeting, and Ken was a key
player for the NIC, so I insisted that he dress more businesslike
for the occasion. He showed up looking really nice in a jacket and
dress shoes. I remember Jon and Noel Chiappa and some others went
up on the same elevator with Ken and myself. Jon was dressed in his
usual hiking boots and lumberjack checked shirt. The other guys were
dressed in similar garb. Ken was the only one dressed up. They kidded
Ken about whether he was going to a wedding or a funeral.

The meeting was heated with a lot of back and forth. However, it was
finally agreed that all would benefit from one internet working group
and a joint approach to naming and addressing. We agreed to use the
Namedroppers working group, and to combine the efforts of DCA and
DARPA into one overall working group, which led to the start of the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). (I believe Mike Corrigan chaired
IETF at the beginning. (36)). Anyway it was a long day. Everyone was
exhausted when it was over. On the way down in the elevator, no one
talked until Ken finally said, ``Well, I'm glad it was a wedding
and not a funeral.'' We all cracked up.

The generic TLD approach of .mil, .gov, .org, .edu, and .com that
the NIC came up with seems to have worked reasonably well, and remains
in use today. The domain name of .net was added to the list later,
based on discussions carried on in the Namedroppers working group.
Dot net was used as a parent domain for various network-type organizations,
such as network service centers and consortia; and network management-related
organizations, such as information centers and operations centers
(14).

I left SRI in 1989. The NIC, with Jose Garcia-Luna-Aceves as director,
continued as the internet naming authority until 1991, when the contract
was competed and awarded to three other contractors. At that time
NSI (Network Solutions?) took over the naming component of the former
NIC.

Now there is the matter of the .com TLD. It is somewhat amusing in
retrospect. There were virtually no commercial sites per se on the
Arpanet/DDN internet at the time of the change over to the DNS (1984-1987.)
The Internet was not yet commercial. This did not happen until after
1990 (37). It was still considered a government network, and any commercial
organizations on it were almost all there under government contracts.
It was not clear whether these organizations should be named under
the domain of their contracting agencies, or named as themselves under
a separate domain. Just to round out the generic TLD naming scheme,
we added a category for business or commercial organizations. In a
meeting with Ken Harrenstien, David Roode, Mary Stahl, and myself,
we discussed .bus (for business) and .com (for commercial). I think
I favored .bus. However, there were other hardware things that ended
in ``bus'' at the time. Ken Harrenstien, while implementing the
DNS server for the NIC, remembers that he changed .bus to .com during
the implementation, because it seemed like a better choice. As I mentioned
above, adding a business or commercial category was an afterthought
to round out the generic concept. Who knew what would eventually become
of .com!!!


\section*{POSTSCRIPT}

Over the years I have been asked about this topic many times. I have
also seen and listened to many discussions that were incorrect. Consequently,
I have tried to describe and document, the role of the Network Information
Center (NIC) and SRI International in naming and addressing from 1970
to 1989. Please do not ask me about anything that happened after 1989.
I had my turn in the barrel, so to speak, and have conveniently avoided
participating in, or tracking, anything happening in the naming world
since I left SRI in 1989 :-). Also, I have donated all of the NIC
and early Internet papers I could find to the Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, CA -- more than 350 boxes. All the references I
have quoted here, as well as the Namedroppers working group emails,
are available from the museum; however, not yet online. I am a volunteer
there, and we are working toward getting the collection into the data
base and the interesting things scanned. All of the old RFCs are available
online at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-index.html. If you have old
notes or papers or files pertaining to the early days of the Internet,
that you think might be important, I urge you to check with Marc Weber,
the Internet Curator at the Computer History Msueum, before you throw
them away.

Also, it would be great if people like: Paul Mockapetris, Joyce Reynolds,
Mike Karels, Ken Harrenstien, David Roode, Mary Stahl, Mark Lottor,
Sue Kirkpatrick, Jose Garcia-Luna-Aceves, Craig Partridge, Mike St.
Johns, Mike Corrigan, Dave Crocker, Vint Cerf, Dick Watson, Heidi
Heiden, Alex McKenzie, and the many participants of the Namedroppers
working group, added their recollectons, so we can finally know the
early history of naming and addressing on the Internet. It was quite
a story of technical collaboration! I would also encourage those,
commercial and not, who came after 1989 to weigh in as well.


\section*{REFERENCES}

1. RFC 235. Site status, E. Westheimer, BBN, Boston, MA, Sept. 1971

2. RFC 252. Network host status, E. Westheimer, BBN, Boston, MA Oct.
1971.

3. RFC 226. Standardization of host mnemonics, P. M. Karp, Mitre Corp,
Bedford, MA, Sep. 1971

4. RFC 247. Proffered set of standard host names, P. M. Karp, Mitre
Corp., Bedford, MA, Oct. 1971.

5. RFC 273. More on standard host names, R. W. Watson, SRI, Menlo
Park, CA, Oct.18, 1971

6. A hostname policy for ARPA. Minutes of a meeting with Vint Cerf,
R. Watson, J. White, E. Feinler, and J. North at SRI, Menlo Park,
CA, Jul. 15, 1973.

7. RFC 289. What we hope is an official list of host names, R.W. Watson,
SRI, Menlo Park, CA, Dec. 21, 1971.

8. RFC 606. Host names on-line, L. P. Deutsch, Xerox Palo Alto Res.
Center, Palo Alto, CA, Dec. 1973

9. RFC 627. ASCII text file of hostnames, M. D. Kudlick, E. J. Feinler,
SRI, Menlo Park, CA, Mar. 1974

10. RFC 95. Distribution of NWG/RFCs through the NIC, Crocker, S.
D., UCLA, CA., Feb. 1971

11. RFC 322. Well known socket numbers. V/ Cerf. J. Postel, UCLA,
CA., Mar. 1972.

12. RFC 739. Assigned numbers, J. Postel, USC-ISI, Marina del Rey,
CA., Nov. 1977.

13. Memorandum for Distribution 535. Arpanet management transition,
Rockwell, J.M. DCA, Washintion, D.C., July 1975.

14. RFC 1032 Domain administrators guide, M. K. Stahl, SRI, Menlo
Park, CA., Nov. 1987.

15. RFC 810. DoD internet host table specification. E. J. Feinler,
K. Harrenstien, Z. Su, V. White, SRI, Menlo Park, CA., Mar. 1982.

16. RFC 811. Hostnames server, K. Harrenstien, V. White, E. J. Feinler,
SRI, Menlo Park, CA., Mar. 1982

17. RFC 812. NICNAME/WHOIS, K. Harrenstien, V. White, E.J. Feinler,
SRI, Menlo Park, CA., Mar. 1982.

18. RFC Index \href{http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-index.html}{http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-index.html}

19. RFC 882. Domain names: Concepts and facilities, P. V. Mockapetris,
USC-ISI, Marina del Rey, CA., Nov. 1983.

20. RFC 883. Domain names: Implementation specification, P.V. Mockapetris,
USC-ISI, Marina del Rey, CA., Nov. 1983.

21. RFC 1034 Domain names -- concepts and facilities, P.V. Mockapetris,
USC-ISI, Marina del Rey, CA., Nov. 1987.

22. RFC 1035. Domain names -- implementation and specification, P.V.
Mockapetris, USC-ISI, Marina del Rey, CA., Nov. 1987.

23. RFC 881. Domain names plan and schedule, J. Postel, USC-ISI, Marina
del Rey, CA., Nov. 1983.

24. RFC 897. Domain names system imlementation schedule, J. Postel,
USC-ISI, Marina del Rey, CA., June 1984.

25. DDN Mgt. Bulletin 22. Domain names transition, DCA, Washington,
DC, Mar. 16, 1984.

26. DDN Mgtt. Bulletin 42. St. Johns, M. Phase II of the MILNET domain
name implementation. DCA, Washington, D.C., Nov. 2, 1988.

27. RFC 1031. MILNET name domain transition, W.D. Lazear, Mitre Corp.,
Washington, D.C., Nov. 1987

28. RFC 952. DoD Internet host table specification, K. Harrenstien,
M. Stahl, E. Feinler, SRI, Menlo Park, CA, Oct. 1985.

29. RFC 953. Hostname server, K. Harrenstien, M. Stahl, E. Feinler,
SRI, Menlo Park, CA, Oct. 1985.

30. RFC 954. Nicname/WHOIS, K. Harrenstien, M. Stahl, E. Feinler,
SRI, Menlo Park, CA, Oct. 1985

31. RFC 1033. Domain administrators operations guide, M. Lottor, SRI,
Menlo Park, CA, Nov. 1987.

32. Email to Thomas Harris from Elizabeth Feinler. Subject: Comments
on domains, COIs, and net numbers, SRI, Menlo Park, CA, Oct. 6, 1982

33. E. Feinler. Meeting with Jon Postel, personal notes, SRI, Menlo
Park, CA, Dec. 1982.

34. RFC 920. Domain requirements, J. Postel and J. Reynolds, USC-ISI,
Marina del Rey, Oct. 1984

35. RFC 921. Domain name system implementation schedule -- revised,
J. Postel, USC-ISI, Oct. 1984.

36. IETF as a Pentagon thing. Hans-Werner Braun email response to
Craig Partdrige, Internet History Digest, Oct. 30, 2001 \href{http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2001-October/000064.html}{http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2001-October/000064.html}

37. RFC 1192. Commercialization of the Internet, summary report, B.
Kahin, Harvard University, Nov. 1990.
\end{document}
