
Mike Karels, Phil Almquist, and Paul Vixie then took over BIND maintenance. In 1985, Kevin Dunlap of DEC substantially revised the DNS implementation. In 1984, four UC Berkeley students, Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou, wrote the first Unix name server implementation for the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, commonly referred to as BIND. These were updated in RFC 973 in January 1986. The Internet Engineering Task Force published the original specifications in RFC 882 and RFC 883 in November 1983. Mockapetris instead created the Domain Name System in 1983 while at the University of Southern California. Postel directed the task of forging a compromise between five competing proposals of solutions to Paul Mockapetris. īy the early 1980s, maintaining a single, centralized host table had become slow and unwieldy and the emerging network required an automated naming system to address technical and personnel issues. She and her team managed the Host Naming Registry from 1972 to 1989. Computers at educational institutions would have the domain edu, for example. Feinler suggested that domains should be based on the location of the physical address of the computer. She and her team developed the concept of domains. Later, Feinler set up a WHOIS directory on a server in the NIC for retrieval of information about resources, contacts, and entities. Computers, including their hostnames and addresses, were added to the primary file by contacting the SRI Network Information Center (NIC), directed by Feinler, telephone during business hours. Maintenance of numerical addresses, called the Assigned Numbers List, was handled by Jon Postel at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), whose team worked closely with SRI. Elizabeth Feinler developed and maintained the first ARPANET directory. The Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) maintained a text file named HOSTS.TXT that mapped host names to the numerical addresses of computers on the ARPANET. Using a simpler, more memorable name in place of a host's numerical address dates back to the ARPANET era. That data can be used to gain insight on, and track responsibility for, a given host on the Internet. For zones operated by a registry, administrative information is often complemented by the registry's RDAP and WHOIS services. Each subdomain is a zone of administrative autonomy delegated to a manager. The DNS reflects the structure of administrative responsibility in the Internet. This process of using the DNS to assign proximal servers to users is key to providing faster and more reliable responses on the Internet and is widely used by most major Internet services.

The key functionality of the DNS exploited here is that different users can simultaneously receive different translations for the same domain name, a key point of divergence from a traditional phone-book view of the DNS. When a user accesses a distributed Internet service using a URL, the domain name of the URL is translated to the IP address of a server that is proximal to the user. Users take advantage of this when they use meaningful Uniform Resource Locators ( URLs) and e-mail addresses without having to know how the computer actually locates the services.Īn important and ubiquitous function of the DNS is its central role in distributed Internet services such as cloud services and content delivery networks. The DNS can be quickly and transparently updated, allowing a service's location on the network to change without affecting the end users, who continue to use the same hostname. 6.5 Oblivious DNS ("ODNS") and Oblivious DoH ("ODoH")Īn often-used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses.

