[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

    (Eric? wrote)

    No one from this list nor anyone else I tried to contact could give me a
    definitive answer on when this decision was made. I had to try and figure it
    out myself. It appears that something changed between May and July of 1984.
    In July, a draft RFC was posted that included the ISO-3166 list for the
    first time. Four months beforehand, Postel first announced to Namedroppers
    that he felt there should be countries represented somewhere in the
    hierarchy. This came after a fairly significant amount of lobbying by all
    kinds of people, but many of them had OSI sympathies.

My collegue Piet Beertema was involved in the discussions about
which list to use. I remember that among other possible lists where
the UPU list and the list of Road Vehicle signs (or something like
that). The last one has variable length codes which didn't make it
attractive.  The ISO list was indeed interesting because the UN is
involved.  And the 2-char instead of the 3-char codes where attractive
because there would be no clashes with existing domains (com, edu,
net).

I alsways think that the whole DNS became popular independent of
the transport protocol due to the uumapping project and similar
stuff (the JANET gateway etc).

	jaap