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35 years ago today: the first domain name symbolics.com was registered

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Re: 35 years ago today: the first domain name symbolics.com was registered

#11

Post by wolfgang42 »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #7
greenyoda wrote: post #3

RFC 882, which defined domain-style addressing, was released in 1983: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc882 There was domain-style addressing that predated domains like ".com" and ".edu". The original top-level domains were ".arpa" (for ARPANET) and ".mil" (for MILNET). Symbolics was "symbolics.arpa" before it was "symbolics.com".

If anyone knows: How were RFCs distributed before the modern Internet as we know it existed?

In the very early days (from RFC 3):

  DISTRIBUTION

  One copy only will be sent from the author's site to"

        1.  Bob Kahn, BB&N
        2.  Larry Roberts, ARPA
        3.  Steve Carr, UCLA
        4.  Jeff Rulifson, UTAH
        5.  Ron Stoughton, UCSB
        6.  Steve Crocker, UCLA

  Reproduction if desired may be handled locally.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3.html

Re: 35 years ago today: the first domain name symbolics.com was registered

#13

Post by wolfgang42 »

thought_alarm wrote: post #8

I wonder what the first UUCP nodes were named.

Not sure about UUCP specifically, but a persistent problem until the introduction of DNS seems to have been that various places in the network sometimes had different names for a single host. Check out the discussion referenced from RFC 298, “What we hope is an official list of host names”: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc289.html

Re: 35 years ago today: the first domain name symbolics.com was registered

#19

Post by CarlRJ »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #7
greenyoda wrote: post #3

RFC 882, which defined domain-style addressing, was released in 1983: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc882 There was domain-style addressing that predated domains like ".com" and ".edu". The original top-level domains were ".arpa" (for ARPANET) and ".mil" (for MILNET). Symbolics was "symbolics.arpa" before it was "symbolics.com".

If anyone knows: How were RFCs distributed before the modern Internet as we know it existed?

Before the Internet there was Usenet and a world-wide network network of machines connected together via UUCP, doing email and such over point-to-point dialup (modem) links. Sending mail was a matter of knowing a complete path through the network from your source machine to the recipient's destination machine (and Usenet news implemented public discussion groups over this network). If I recall correctly, you could send specially formatted email messages to the server where the RFCs lived, and an autoresponder program would read your message and email back the requested RFCs.
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