What is the history behind domain names? Print

The practice of using a simple memorable abstraction of a host's numerical address on a computer network dates back to the ARPANET era, before the advent of today's commercial Internet. In the early network, each computer on the network retrieved the hosts file (host.txt) from a computer at SRI (now SRI International),[5][6] which mapped computer hostnames to numerical addresses. The rapid growth of the network made it impossible to maintain a centrally organized hostname registry, and in 1983 the Domain Name System was introduced on the ARPANET and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 882 and RFC 883.