Origins of the Domain Name System

The Domain Name System (DNS) was the major milestone in the Internet between the advent of the IP/TCP, internet, and the web. Any Internet user gets a glimpse of it every time they see a URL. What is perhaps less realized is how much the creation of the DNS enabled development and evolution of the Internet and Internet applications such as the World Wide Web (Web) - something that has become manifestly clear to us through our several decades of research on the origins of the Internet. The following contribution to the history of DNS consists of descriptions by Paul Mockapetris, Mike Roberts, Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Tin Wee Tan. The authors outline how the aforementioned experienced the origins of the governance of DNS and expansion of the TLD space and sketch the DNS' origin and evolution. Origin refers to its history up to the time when the first machines came to rely on it as a production system, roughly 1986. The evolution phase takes us to the current decade. Also covered are DNS security issues and the internationalization of the DNS, which created a big movement to drive the change of the DNS to the next level. The DNS absolutely changed the development of the Internet and its evolution continues. As the inventor Mockapetris has said about the origin of DNS, "I built the first floor and maybe the second floor and then people came along and added about 20 more floors."