On 03/14/2018 15:14, Angus Robinson wrote: interesting - thanks!  this makes sense in hindsight :) -pete -- Pete Wright pete(a)nomadlogic.org @nomadlogicLA

I was at UCL-CS when we turned on DNS in 85/6 -This was the eastern end of the spiral arm of the galaxy, feeding MoD and Goonhilly downs and the Post Office, as well as a rather odd service mapping ARPAnet to JANET via kermit amongst other things. Smoke filled rooms with spooks in dark glasses and men with ribbon-chest-boards were mentioned in passing when UCL staff went to SRI for meetings. Odd times. I never went. Bob Braden came over for some liaison meeting at the end of SATNET (2meg satlink, huge for the day) and was grumpy because due deference was not shown. Mike Lesk came for a long residency. he was nice, chatty, obsessed with Tristram Shandy. I liked him more. At one level, "nothing happened" because mail and news still flowed as it used to. But random connects in FTP and Telnet now had subtly different underpinnings. Before this turn-on, when we used /etc/hosts.txt in anger we could wind up being delayed beyond the 30 second login timer and fail to connect for service because lookups files timed out. After this turn-on, we connected more reliably more often. I was doing OSI code work, and had to share some files with people at BRL and UDel and other places, it was a real pain in the neck. The fuzzball had been turned off in favour of a BBN butterfly. oooooh multiprocessing. sexy. Also flakey as hell. I had root on some of the boxes, two or three flicks of configuration changed from one t'other and back again. It was hard to get excited about it because ubiquitous meant still having serial-line communications with UUCP and dealing with Jacob Palme in his not-quite-USENET world of research mailing lists, and bitnet. mmdf and news looks the same if you ship the bytes on tape, in the end. On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 9:22 AM, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:

Pete Wright <pete(a)nomadlogic.org> wrote: Registrars are a late 1990s concept :-) They are a consequence of the effort to break up the Network Solutions monopoly - the IAHC and the foundation of ICANN. (Another consequence was the introduction of new TLDs.) The early technical mechanism underpinning this policy decision was the registry-registrar protocol (RRP, RFC 2832) which has a much more straightforward name (and design) than its successor EPP, the extensible provisioning protocol. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ - I xn--zr8h punycode Northeast Viking, North Utsire: Southeasterly 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8 in south, decreasing 4 at times in north. Moderate or rough in northern and eastern North Utsire, otherwise rough or very rough. Fair. Good.

The key might be in the definition/timing of the term "Internet". ;) On 3/14/2018 6:23 PM, Michael Kjörling wrote:

On 3/14/2018 6:52 PM, George Michaelson wrote: Quite true.

On Thu, 15 Mar 2018, Tony Finch wrote: Yeah, I was referring to DNS as opposed to HOSTS.TXT of course. I'm happy to be corrected/updated; I happen to have an interest in geeky history (as if that wasn't apparent). OK, I'll bite: how do you do this? -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

I think it is maybe NAVTEX or some ancestor of that. Somewhere there are still warnings that the shipping forecast via the internet is not to be relied on: the one transmitted by NAVTEX or equivalent is (as well as, perhaps, the voice one on LW), and that version always gets out (well, if it doesn't it's because the Met Office is a radioactive hole in the ground). --tim

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 5:04 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: ​Well this history is sort of strange because it was more random/back patched than the historian likes to admit. For instance DEC definitely had an ARPAnet connection and I think IBM did also. Note Tektronix and HP did not have ARPAnet connections, but Tek was a very early UUCP site and HP followed suite about 2 years later. As others have pointed out the ARPANETname space was a tad more flat: user@site and SITE was sort of large (MIT, CMU, DEC) - which originally mapped to IMPs. Different networks (like SAT-NET) started to strain the naming scheme. As Ron reminded us, with the coming of the splitting off the DoD to DDN's responsibility and the creation of MIL-Net people began to talk about needing more that 'site.' Hence the creation of responsibility 'domains' ​-- which (as I recall) was less for SW naming and more for administrative control. Their a a number of salient points here. First there was no real registration as we think of today. For instance, I was personally assigned ccc.com because I had been 'ccc' on the UUCP net, and I was already moving packets around from UUCP and to Arpa/Internet folks via gateways. It was confusing time and a lot of different networks had bridges/email gateways. At that time, my friends at BBN just put me in the database long before I was directly connected or assigned my own Class C network (which happened a few years later). This allowed ARPAnet, CS-Net etc to send emails to me the gateway point was defined in the BBN database for MMDF (not sendmail BTW) -- I've forgotten where all that name washing got done -- it might have been BBN proper, but somehow I think UDEL was in the middle of some of that [someone like Ron might remember]. Adding sites like me was done because BBN was trying to 'flatten' some of the UUCP naming mess on their side (the message on the 'user' part of the ARPA addresses was a wash with funny characters - like !, % etc to try to slime in the different gateways]. A key thing to remember here, is that all happened before Symbolics was incorporated. And I was 'late' compared to others. In fact 'Tektronix' was running IP internally but used UUCP for external email as they could not get an ARPAnet connection. They later would joined CS-NET and used Phone Net when that was first allowed and finally they were an early 'commercial' IP site that BBN connected with Cisco gear. It should also be pointed out that since DEC was existed on the ARPAnet and was grandfathered as DEC.Com (and I believe IBM the same) - this is all long before Symbolics.Com was created. So it's hard to really call Symbolics 'first' other than to say the were probably the first firm to ask BBN how do we do this and make it formal, right around the time when DoD was trying to get out of the ARPAnet and was trying to find a way to transition it to commercial firms. For whatever it is worth, I also remember being ticked off when I got my first bill years later from Network Solutions because at some point, the BBN/SRI databases came under their control. I had been CCC.COM for a long number of years by then (5-10 maybe) and what was this all about. Clem ᐧ