[TUHS] early BIND

Tony Finch dot at dotat.at
Fri Aug 28 04:06:24 AEST 2020


Another question at the intersection of the Internet-History and TUHS
lists...

I was wondering about the early history of BIND. I started off wondering
about the relative ages of JEEVES (the original PDP10 DNS server) and
BIND. Judging by the dates on RFCs 881 - 883, the DARPA contract
commissioning BIND, and the Berkeley tech reports, it seems there wasn't
much time when the DNS was without BIND.

But I was struck by the resolver API set out on page 8 of Berkeley tech
report UCB/CSD-84-182: it looks nothing like the familiar API that ended
up in 4.3BSD.

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1984/5957.html

https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD/usr/src/lib/libc/net/named/gethostnamadr.c

So I'm wondering if there's anything out there recording the history
between the 1984 tech reports and the 4.3BSD release in 1986.

(It's also noteworthy that early BIND supported incremental DNS updates
and zone transfers, which didn't reappear in standard form until RFC 2136
(1997) and RFC 1995 (1996)...)

Tony.
-- 
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