[ih] Domain Names

[Craig Partridge]

Hi Richard:

You're confusing a large number of topics which makes it hard to do history
right.

Regarding host names -- Vint's given you the gist.  There was a text table
for hostnames, one host per line.  Hosts had an official name and could also
have aliases.  It was managed by the SRI NIC.  If you had a host, you
registered your name with the NIC and they put it into the table.
When I joined the net in 1983 it took a bit under a week to get a host into
the table.

The table was retrieved by FTPing it from the NIC.  We used a hardcoded
IP address (some folks started out by FTPing from a symbolic name [sri-nic]
but one day an editing error left the name out of the host table and then
people couldn't retrieve a new table!!).  To reduce the FTP burdens,
big organizations typically had one machine FTP the table from the NIC
and then had each machine within their organization grab a copy from the
internal machine.  Note the fact that hosts periodically got deleted by
partial transfers, software bugs, etc. is why many Internet protocols permit
use of raw IP addresses.  It also explains why many old Internet folks
still remember the IP addresses of some machines (my first workstation
was bbn-loki at 128.89.1.178).

Regarding maps -- they were compiled by the Network Operations Center at
BBN.  Frequency varied. At one time I think they were updated monthly.
Later every quarter.  They only showed ARPANET connectivity.  A selection
was published some years ago in Computer Communication Review (and I think
was put on-line by Chris Edmondson at UT).

As the Internet took off, Mike Brescia at the NOC used to periodically put
together Internet maps, I think mostly to help NOC folks as they interacted
with the rest of the Net.  These maps were published for some years in the
IETF proceedings (www.ietf.org).  I also have some color versions made for
35mm slides by BBN's art department.

Thanks!

Craig

> I can track it in the RFCs back to 597, which is some sort of official 
> list of all the hosts that were running at the time, and interestingly, 
> gives notice of a move projected for MIT-MULTICS from one IMP to 
> another. But it says it's "the latest network map" so naturally I'm 
> curious about the first network map.
> 
> On 1/19/2010 8:46 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> > we had host.txt that mapped host names into IP addresses.
> > SRI NIC managed it and you downloaded this text file as reference to 
> > map into IP addresses.
> >
> > Host names before DNS were simple things like MIT, UCLA, etc
> >
> > so an email address might be something like vcerf at isi-c
> >
> > the domain name system introduced hierarchy, cacheing, timeouts, and 
> > so on as well as FQDN concept.
> >
> > vint
> >
> > On Jan 19, 2010, at 11:21 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:
> >
> >> We're coming up on the 25th anniversary of the first domain name 
> >> registration, that of symbolics.com on March 15, 1985. Not the first 
> >> domain name created, but the first one registered in the fledgling 
> >> domain name system. Since I'm too old to remember that era, I'm 
> >> wondering if anybody has any salient observations about what the 
> >> Internet was like before the domain name system was created. How did 
> >> people keep track of everything?
> >>
> >> I seem to remember a cumbersome system of bang addresses for e-mail 
> >> that apparently arose out of UUCP, but wasn't there a more elegant 
> >> system of naming for ARPANET and the fledgling Internet before 1985? 
> >> I have the feeliing that there will be some events to commemorate the 
> >> rise of the Dot Com era, and it would be nice if some of the facts 
> >> were more or less in order.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> RB
> >>
> >> -- 
> >> Richard Bennett
> >> Research Fellow
> >> Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
> >> Washington, DC
> >>
> >
> 
> -- 
> Richard Bennett
> Research Fellow
> Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
> Washington, DC
********************
Craig Partridge
Chief Scientist, BBN Technologies
E-mail: craig at aland.bbn.com or craig at bbn.com
Phone: +1 517 324 3425