happy.birthday.dns@20
Happy Birthday today to the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), introduced on this day back in 1983, right around the time I took out a loan to buy a brand-new Kaypro II luggable and a state-of-the-art 300-baud modem and a dot-matrix printer. The Kaypro was my second computer, the first being a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A that I wish I still had. The TI had a speech synthesizer, and if you click on those words, you can hear one talk. Or, for a real nostalgia indulgence, you can download a TI-99/4A simulator for Windows. Haven't tried it myself, though. You can also find a Kaypro emulator, but it doesn't talk. My old Kaypro gave me the best error message I ever got from a computer: "one of us has made a mistake."
Anyway, way back then, Internet addresses were all numbers, and there was no automatic way of finding an address. You had to look it up, manually. Then on June 23, 1983, Internet pioneers Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris tested a new system that not only allowed addresses to be found without human intervention, it allowed those addresses to be represented by names, organized by domain such as .com, .net, .org, etc. If you think dot-com advertising was annoying during the late '90s boom years, just imagine how much worse it would have been if it were all just a bunch of numbers competing for your attention.
Many years later, there was an organization known as the Domain Name Support Organization, and it once had a general assembly of Internet developers and users that once got to vote on such questions as whether there should be new domains like .biz and .info. I was once one of those people.
Meanwhile, the Internet continues its evolution. A few days ago, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced the deployment of internationalized domain names.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:15 PM