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

[Jack Haverty]

Very cool, thanks.  I was at Oracle and involved with operating the 
corporate intranet in the 90s.   We always wondered exactly what all the 
traffic was doing!

In terms of Internet History, one observation I offer is that, as users 
invaded the Internet, they started to build things themselves.   It was 
(and is) easy to do so given the "platform" provided by TCP and IP.   It 
seems that such development continues even today, evidenced by popular 
applications and their underlying technology (CDNs et al) which are 
prominent with netizens such as Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, et al.

IMHO, there's been a steady but unrelenting shift of technology 
development away from the traditional research/engineering machinery and 
into the users' (including corporations) realms.   I guess that's why I 
keep wondering how much of the IETF's technology captured in RFCs is 
actually what is being used in the operating Internet.

Something for historians to ponder....

/Jack

On 7/20/21 2:30 PM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
>
>> On Jul 20, 2021, at 12:41 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> ...in the early 1990s, I was working at Oracle, and we had a similar need.   Database users (basically the hordes of people in corporations with some kind of terminal in front of them) wanted to connect to databases, by name. So we created some software called Oracle Names, which did pretty much the same things as DNS but would do it in any flavor of network and even across different networks by means of an IP gateway.
> Oracle was (perhaps unknowingly) paying for a significant amount of interesting Internet development in that era.  In 1994-1995 I built an anycast distribution infrastructure for Oracle, with FTP server clusters at two IXPs on the east coast, and two IXPs on the west coast, to distribute Oracle’s documentation and training materials, which were otherwise too slow and costly to download from any single point.  To the best of my knowledge, that was the first national-scale production anycast CDN.  I’d done smaller ones within California starting in 1989.
>
>                                  -Bill
>