by D. Vogt

Created on: August 04, 2010

As Internet uses, we are accustomed to navigating between websites using their unique address names, known as domain names or URLs (although technically URL actually refers to what follows after the domain name). In fact, however, computers communicate with one another exclusively through another unique address system, a series of numbers called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. The massive database which links easily remembered URL names to the meaningful index of IP addresses is called the Domain Name System (DNS), and has been the basis for a usable Internet since it was devised in the early 1980s.

Under the current Internet Protocol, known as IPv4, all computers connected to the Internet identify themselves by means of a unique number or address, consisting of four digits, each between 0 and 255. For example, the IP address of Helium.com, according to the publicly searchable Network Solutions database, is 67.59.146.30. This means that, whenever a person types "www.helium.com" (known as a domain name) into their Web browser, their computer connects to a separate DNS computer, learns that it needs to communicate with the computer with that IP address, and then does so, all without making this process visible to the end user.

- ARPANET and Hosts.txt

When the first version of the Internet (known as the ARPANet) was brought online by the U.S. military and its university partners in the 1970s, the fact that computers were identified by lengthy number sequences was not a problem. A limited number of technical specialists actually needed to use the system, and each needed to communicate only with a small number of other computers. However, as the number of different servers proliferated online, and the userbase gradually transitioned from a small group of computer scientists to a large group of non-specialized users, obviously communication through number addresses quickly became untenable. 

Even before the current-day DNS was created, steps were already taken to solve this problem. Computers could download a Hosts file from the Network Information Center (NIC), a project run by the Stanford Research Institute (a non-profit corporation now known as SRI International). The Hosts.txt file contained an index of all  This, too, however, could not cope with the rapidly growing Internet. SRI's resources and bandwidth simply could not cope with mounting demands for its Hosts list. In addition, although it maintained the Hosts list, it had no authority for parceling

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