Dot-com turns 20

[daum]

The brainchild of two University of Southern California computer scientists is turning 20 this Monday.


The Domain Name System, or DNS -- better known as .com and .edu -- went online June 23, 1983. It was developed by Paul Mockapetris and the late Jon Postel at the USC School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute.

The system was part of a pre-Internet project the two men were working on. Postel gave his partner an assignment to develop a stable system to translate numerical codes that identified Web addresses into names that were easy for people to use and remember.

Postel planned the system and Mockapetris developed and coded it.

On June 23, 1983, the system was put to the test and passed. The DNS system has since expanded to include extensions such as .gov, .net, and .org, among others.

Mockapetris is now the chairman and chief scientist at Nominum Inc. in Redwood City, Calif

 

[dtobias]

A lot of mistaken info here... obviously, the DNS of 20 years ago had nothing to do with identifying "Web addresses", since the Web didn't exist until Tim Berners-Lee invented it in 1990. It was for identifying hostnames on the ARPAnet. And .com, .org, .edu, .gov, and .mil were all proposed at the same time, with .net following shortly before the system was implemented (so that all six TLDs were in the initial implementation of DNS, and are equally old). .int came a few years later, and was the last non-country TLD to be added until the 2001 ICANN batch.