[ih] A paper that has something to to with the Internet

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 01:10:44AM -0400,
 John R. Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote 
 a message of 36 lines which said:

> It might be interesting to ask Paul Mockapetris if he considered
> other topologies (he does answer his mail)

I discussed several times the history of the DNS with Paul Mockapetris
(for instance in the context of qname minimization) and, when asked
about the rationale for a design choice, he often replies honestly
"I'm not sure" or "I don't remember". Which seems to indicate that
there was not a systematic and documented effort at the origin of the
DNS to explore in detail all the possible alternatives.

This is not a criticism: his goal was not to do a survey of name
resolution systems, but to produce something which worked (which he
did). When designing a new system, there is a fine line to draw
between "studying so many variants you never have time to actually
create something" and "jumping on the first idea without considering
the other possibilities". IMHO, the choices were basically the correct
ones, giving the techniques of the time (blockchain was not invented
yet :-)