[ih] Dot Com etc

John Levine johnl at iecc.com
Wed Jan 20 13:39:20 PST 2010


>Far as I can tell, the only advantage of the TLD cluster we have is that 
>it simplifies the name management contracting space. If that's not an 
>issue, a pure Grapevine seems to make a lot more sense. Given that 
>everybody wants a .com, even for non-profits, we're essentially still 
>using ARPANET host names anyhow.

My recollection is that the original idea was that the first and second
levels would be fairly small, and names would be long, e.g. 
wks12.compsci.berkeley.uc.edu.

I think that all changed when Mosaic or maybe Netscape treated "foo"
in the address box as "foo.com".  So I guess it's Marc Andreesen's
fault.

R's,
John



More information about the Internet-history mailing list