[TUHS] [COFF] Pondering the hosts file

[Henry Bent]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2021 at 15:30, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 15:12 Jan Schaumann <jschauma at netmeister.org> wrote:
>
>> "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe at math.utah.edu> wrote:
>> > The hosts file format definition appears in
>> >
>> >       RFC 752: Universal host table
>> >       RFC 810: DoD Internet host table specification
>> >       RFC 952: DoD Internet host table specification
>> >
>> > A 1986 hosts.txt file in my PDP-10 archives notes:
>>
>> The earliest copy of the hosts file I could find was
>>
>> http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/tops20_v6_1_tcpip_installation_tp_ft6/06/new-system/hosts.txt
>>
>> ;GIDNEY::<PAETZOLD.ARPANET>HOSTS.TXT.5, 27-Mar-85 13:11:54, Edit by
>> PAETZOLD
>> ;GIDNEY::<PAETZOLD.ARPANET>HOSTS.TXT.4, 25-Mar-85 13:56:55, Edit by
>> PAETZOLD
>> ;local stuff
>>
>> ; DoD Internet Host Table
>> ;  22-Mar-85
>> ;  Version number 436
>>
>> Does anybody have an earlier copy?
>>
>> -Jan
>
>
> This was in the first page of Google search results for "DoD Internet Host
> Table"; I bet with a little more research I could come up with something
> much older.  Or one of the PDP-10 folks will find the original...
>
> https://emaillab.jp/dns/hosts/
>
> -Henry
>

Perhaps a more interesting question, and one which I cannot quickly answer
(nor am I going to go pinging huge swaths of the public internet), is are
there any hosts in any version of HOSTS.TXT that are still on the public
internet in the same location?  Or - and perhaps there is an easy answer to
this that I do not know - is there a repository of old WHOIS databases?  I
remember being stymied ~20 years ago that Ultrix had SRI-NIC.ARPA hardcoded
in the whois binary and I couldn't find a hostname of the correct length
with which to replace it...

-Henry
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