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DNS Structure: Introduction

When the Internet was first created (as the ARPAnet, in 1969), its naming system was a flat namespace, where every location in the network was listed in a file (hosts.txt) that had to be updated every time anybody else entered the net. That was easy when there were only three computers on the net (as in 1969), or even a few hundred (as in the '70s), but as the network hosts grew into the thousands by the '80s, the "founding-fathers" of the Internet decided to create a more logical system to name them. This was the domain name system.

The Introduction of Domain Names

Domain names were first proposed in the early 1980s as a structured naming system for the ARPAnet. The earliest official document describing their purpose and structure was RFC 882, written by Paul Mockpetris, generally regarded as the "father" of the domain name system, in 1983. This document has been obsolete by later RFC documents (Requests For Comments, which despite their informal name are the place where many significant standards documents for the Internet reside), such as RFC 1591. The earliest document doesn't even have ".com", or any other of the current top level domains, in it; those came later. The basic definition of how the naming system worked came before any specific name assignments in it.

When the first top-level domains were implemented, around 1985, there was hardly a land rush to register them as there is for new TLDs now. Although registering a domain didn't cost anything, it required some technical expertise to get through the registration procedure, which required understanding how the system worked and setting up name servers which would respond to the new domain. No commercial Internet presence providers existed to do it for you! In fact, only institutions associated with government-sponsored research were allowed onto the net in the first place. That's why the original set of top level domains encompassed educational, governmental, military, commercial, organizational, and network-infrastructure entities, but provided no namespace for personal or hobby sites -- these were not expected to be a part of the network at all.

Of the slow trickle of early domain registrations, .edu names dominated, as universities were the big players on the net. In general, each domain name represented an entire network of dozens or hundreds of computers connected to the ARPAnet, or later the Internet, which were given hierarchically structured hostnames within the domain, like c.cs.cmu.edu for machine "C" in the computer science department of Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to the introduction of domain names, these machines had had hostnames in the hosts.txt file which had to be distributed to all systems on the net -- some attempts to introduce logical structure to these hosts had been made, using names like cmu-cs-c, but all such structure was informal and didn't give administrators at any level the ability to create names within their space without going through the global host table. Domain names, on the other hand, had a distributed system of servers where a request for c.cs.cmu.edu would proceed from the root server, to the .edu server, to the cmu.edu server, and finally to the cs.cmu.edu server which would have an entry for machine c. New names could be added at each of these levels by the administrator of its server, without having to consult others elsewhere in the hierarchy.

Soon after the generic TLDs were created, the two-letter country codes also were added, at the request of some of the handful of overseas entities with Internet connections who wanted a namespace that could be controlled on a country-by-country level without being subservient to the U.S. government. Although a .us domain was created also, for the use of the United States, it wasn't much used because Americans were already used to dominating the generic global TLDs.

While a few .com addresses existed from the start, for companies involved in research projects along with the universities (apparently, the first .com domain registered was think.com, on May 24, 1985), true commercialization of the Internet didn't begin until 1989, when the U.S. government liberalized the rules to allow commercial activity unrelated to research. The first experience much of the general public had with domain names was when the commercial online services, such as CompuServe, began to interconnect their e-mail systems so that users could not only send mail to other subscribers of the same system, but also to other commercial online systems, and to the academic systems of the Internet. This required people to learn an address format new to them (though it had been in use for years by the academics) consisting of a username followed by an "@" (at) sign, then a hostname in domain form. Users of commercial online services found that their addresses ended in .com, as part of hostnames like compuserve.com. Users of the hobbyist network of dialup bulletin board systems, FidoNet, got addresses ending in fidonet.org (really long ones, like daniel_tobias@f7.n380.z1.fidonet.org, reflecting the hierarchical structure of FidoNet with zones, nets, and nodes), but, although FidoNet was immensely popular in the computer hobbyist community for a while, the commercial services got a wider general-public audience, so the dominance of .com in the public mindspace began to form.

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