[ih] Very early days of the IANA

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 02:19:11PM +0000,
 Nigel Roberts <nigel at channelisles.net> wrote 
 a message of 9 lines which said:

> On a website recently I saw a reference to the IANA pre-dating the
> Domain Name System -- that is, incredibly, that it was created in
> the early to mid 70s, when of course the DNS arrived in the early
> 80s following the ARPAnet split, and its original job was numbering
> and protocols only.
> 
> Does anyone have any material relating to the pre-naming existence
> of the IANA and its acquisition of naming related functions?

Naming != DNS. There was a standard naming activity a long time before
the DNS, even if it was not under IANA's name. The first one was may
be RFC 235 <http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc235.txt>

For a synthesis, see
<http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2010-March/001297.html>