[TUHS] Happy birthday, symbolics.com!

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 5:04 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Mar 2018, Tony Finch wrote:
>
> As I understand it, the old hosts.txt registrations got grandfathered into
>> the DNS in the .arpa zone - they were ARPANET hosts (e.g. see RFC 921). The
>> modern structure was set up after the transition to IP, so it's fair to
>> call .com and friends Internet domains. (See RFC 920.)
>>
>
> Yeah, I was referring to DNS as opposed to HOSTS.TXT of course.
>
> But it looks like there were a bunch of .edu and .gov names before
>> Symbolics.
>>
>
> I'm happy to be corrected/updated; I happen to have an interest in geeky
> history (as if that wasn't apparent).



​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 at 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
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