Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 05:12:25 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Top-level domains Message-ID: <3C1DEF39.DE92F450@mindspring.com> References: <20011216044542.Y86103-100000@turtle.looksharp.net> <3C1CA6D2.1AC0F625@mindspring.com> <20011217092422.W62493@monorchid.lemis.com> <3C1DBE25.B03DC40@mindspring.com> <9vkjth$2sc2$1@kemoauc.mips.inka.de>
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Christian Weisgerber wrote: > Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> wrote: > > In the UK, it was ".co.uk". in fact, most of Europe used X.500 > > ordering, as in "uk.co.demon" for a very long time. > > Care to substantiate that claim? > The only context in which I've ever heard of those reversed addresses > was JANET, and the UK does not qualify as "most of Europe". The answer to this lies in the lookup middleware and the name translation. The initial value of network connectivity was in email distribution (as someone else noted, primarily Usenet). The middleware for name translation in the U.K. followed the OSI model (most of the U.K. "Internet" was X.25 links, using point to point routing of messages, e.g. "ihnp4!unisys2!century!terry", and was slow to move to domain based routing. FWIW: My first use of the ArpaNet was in 1981, where the University I was attending, the University of Utah, became the fourth site on the first TCP/IP based ArpaNet. Paul Mockapetris designed the original DNS at USC, in order to replace the "hosts.txt" file, back in 1984 (RFC 882 and RFC 883), and it was not until some time afterward (~1987, with the advent of RFC 1034 and RFC 1035) that the DNS was more or less deployed, and applied to email addressing. See RFC 1034 for better details of the history. Also FWIW: One of the first email systems ever was written by Greg Haerr, then at UCSD, and, later, my boss at my first job after college, also in the very early 1980's; it first ran over the old "Berknet" (async serial packet network using Zilog UARTs: the predecessor to the TCP/IP ARPANet) shortly before his graduation, as a project for a UCSD professor Note to antiquarians: you used to have to use seperate programs to send and read mail, and they had to be run manually by a human; it's amazing how different things are in less than 20 years, isn't it? -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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