[ih] .UK vs .GB

[Eric Gade]

The NIC collection at CHM has info about this. The draft RFCs where Postel
first proposed TLDs (between Jan and May 85 I believe) all proposed UK as
examples. Discussion on the "Namedroppers" list at the time made it pretty
clear why: the UCL nodes used the NRS (Name Recocognition Scheme) and
already had UK at the top level (though reversed)

On Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 22:12 Patrik Fältström <paf at frobbit.se> wrote:

> On 13 Apr 2018, at 15:12, John Levine wrote:
>
> > In another list someone was wondering why British domain names are
> mostly in .UK even though the ISO 3166 code has always been .GB.
> >
> > I know this came up before but can't find the discussion.  Pointers or
> rehash welcome.  The first mention I can find of .UK is in an example in
> RFC 821 in 1982, the first statement that ccTLDS would be ISO 3166 codes
> was in 1984.
>
> The only explanation I got orally was that "GB stands for Great Britain,
> while UK stands for United Kingdom of Great Britain and the Northern
> Ireland".
>
> That was enough for me. Don't even remember who explained it, but it was
> around the famous entry of .CS into the root zone that created the
> "interesting" situation with CS.BERKELEY.EDU (and others) and massive
> weird extra hacking in sendmail.cf due to the Janet "reverse" order of
> labels in a domain name.
>
> But, I might also have constructed this story in my head... :-)
>
>    paf
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