[ih] DNS origins?

[Barbara Denny]

 I am curious about the dates you suggest.   I was in the mobility perspective camp but I don't remember anyone telling me that this had been discussed before or providing me any  information in this context at the time.  I didn't start working on packet radio until the end of 1981, or perhaps the beginning of 1982, so anything done  prior to those dates I might not have been aware of.  However, I would have thought other people at BBN would have mentioned it since I am  pretty sure Jil Westcott, BBN packet radio project manager,    is the one who gave me the assignment for the meeting.
barbara

    On Wednesday, June 9, 2021, 01:16:37 PM PDT, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 I remember a lengthy discussion and somewhat heated debate about the 
design for the Internet's name system at the Internet Meeting held in 
San Diego, IIRC at Linkabit.  Sorry, I can't remember exactly when that 
occurred, but it was one of the "winter" meetings which were always held 
somewhere in California.   Pretty sure it was before 1982, probably 1980/81.

There were two "camps" involved in the debate.  One was arguing for 
powerful mechanisms to handle updates of name/address mappings; the 
other was arguing for more simplicity.

I remember asking the two camps to explain what problem they were trying 
to solve.   One camp was focussed on ARPANET-style host computers, which 
changed their IMP ports very rarely.   Expectations were that Internet 
addresses would change in a similar pattern. The other camp was focussed 
on what could be called the "mobile host" problem, exemplified by the 
various Packet Radio experiments that had been going on.   Their 
expectation was that IP addresses might change rapidly and frequently, 
in the heat of a battlefield operation.

These were obviously very different problems, motivating very different 
solutions.  IIRC, the debate led to the DNS implementations and specs 
not long after that meeting in San Diego.

Note that the notion of "Internet Name Server" existed before DNS - see 
IEN 89 -- https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien89.txt  and 116 - 
https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien116.txt

I'll have to look through my old notebooks from the 80s...

/Jack Haverty


On 6/9/21 12:29 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> On 6/9/2021 11:17 AM, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
>>   I remember thoughts about DNS were developed enough by summer of 
>> 1983 that  I was asked to prepare a talk about DNS and packet radio 
>> at what I believe was the last packet radio meeting.  Unfortunately I 
>> don't remember what I used to learn about DNS so I could prepare my 
>> thoughts. I remember this is where I met Jon Postel but I don't 
>> remember if Paul Mockepetris was there.
>
>
> Some additions about timeline:
>
>
> I had nothing to do with the creation of any aspect of the DNS.
>
>
> However RFC 822, defining Internet mail format -- with relatively 
> small modifications from RFC 733 --as published August 1982. It 
> included support for domain name, which is to say support for the 
> dotted name notation in a host reference.
>
> SMTP also added domain name support, at the same time. (duh. Written 
> by Jon.)
>
> I do not remember the details of how the directive to add this support 
> in RFC 822 developed nor how I was told of the syntax. 822 was 
> developed through group discussion, over email.  I don't even recall a 
> face-to-face meeting for it.  SMTP definitely did have f2f sessions.
>
> I only recall one discussion with Jon, concerning the handling of 
> domain names in SMTP, where I was confused that it always passed the 
> entire domain name, rather than stripping off the right-hand field, as 
> the message transited a hop.  I had not yet understood that this was 
> not a source route.
>
> So I believe the general concept of the administrative/semantic 
> hierarchy -- distinct from the distributed operational query mechanism 
> -- was fully set by Fall of 1982.  (I'm not saying the latter wasn't 
> but that I don't know anything about that part of the design timeline.)
>
> d/
>


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