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

[John Levine]

It appears that Stephane Bortzmeyer via Internet-history <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> said:
>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 :-)

If you look at the design criteria for the DNS, good read-only performance via replication, highly
scalable, distributed management, there weren't a lot of plausible design options and there still aren't.

In fairness, when people were designing the DNS in the early 1980s I doubt it occurred to anyone
that less than 20 years later, DNS names would have become collectable and tradable fashion accessories.

R's,
John