[ih] .UK vs .GB

[Paul Vixie]

John Day wrote:
> ...
>
> Of course, the Internet screwed up DNS by making it a macro-resolver
> for IP addresses rather than a directory and making it something the
> application had to deal with. ...

the design had many flaws, but remains the best example of "the art of 
the possible" i have seen in my short lifetime. it was good enough, and 
that's why it beat out every alternative which might have been the best.

> This is something the first Unix system on the Net (1975) got right.
> They hacked file_io and extended the file system, so that the syntax
> was “<file desc>  = open(<host name>/<application-name>)”  That would
> have been a much better direction for the future than sockets.

maybe. that approach later came to pass in linux, in devfs. i am not 
sure i would have wanted to try for it in a 16-bit address space though.

-- 
P Vixie