June 23 - DNS birthday

Wired wrote yesterday about the birthday of the DNS architecture, which is traditionally celebrated on June 23. It was on this day back in 1983 that the first test (but successful!) Launch of this system was carried out.

Details under the cut.

On June 23, 1983, Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel completed the first successful launch of an automated, distributed DNS domain name system. DNS will be the foundation for mass expansion, popularization and commercialization of the global Internet.
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The large networks of the time (Arpanet and CSnet) depended on the bulky and exponentially growing “phone book” of addresses, called the “host table”. It was a text file maintained by SRI International, located in the town of Menlo Park, California. In order to connect to another computer on the network, it was necessary to know its numeric address.

Greg Partridge (Craig Partridge), another of the founders of the DNS system, later called the host tables a “nightmare”. Each user of the network had to copy his latest version at night. In this scheme “there were many opportunities to make a mistake, and we made them regularly”.

“People finally realized that the old scheme could not work forever,” said Mokapetris. He worked at the University of South Carolina, and his supervisor, John Postel, assigned him the task of working out a new system for assigning and recording Internet addresses.

His decision was truly remarkable. It continued to use the system of digital assignments, but allowed to reach the remote computer and by name. The system was hierarchical and distributed. Top-level domains could denote different types of users, such as .mil or .edu. Once a name like berkeley.edu was assigned to the University of California at Berkeley, its system administrator could independently add computers to this domain, giving them numerical designations and names. The administrator could also delegate individual subdomains.

A few months after the first testing of the new naming system and making various improvements, Mokapetris, Postel and Partridge published their idea in the November 1983. RFC memorandum. as addition, and then and full replacement of the table of hosts.

The list of top-level domains was officially agreed only in October 1984, and implemented in January 1985, but in fact they already worked at .com, edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org addresses. Since the DNS system was originally designed to support more than 50 million records, it was expanded and became international. It now contains over a billion records, including all DNS names, hidden from us behind firewalls.

The SkyDNS team congratulates the creators of the domain name system, system administrators, as well as all Internet users on this wonderful day.

Thanks to this revolutionary idea, today we can access sites using clear human names, rather than referring to a huge table of IP addresses.