DNS/History

A bit of history on DNS

In the 70s, DNS was not yet available, The alternative was a text file on every computer, like a local address book that mapped Names to numeric addresses, There were no Top level domains, the word eddy could have meant a certain computer and the word ourlab could have meant something else, There was no need for .com, .net, or any other.

The hosts file is still available and still has higher priority over the DNS system, so if you edit the file /windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts and added the following line to it

127.0.0.1 example.com 127.0.0.1 www.example.com

you could point your browser to www.example.com and your own computer will come up (Assuming you have a web server like apache installed)

a similar file on linux - Unix - BSD is /etc/hosts

Hosts is no longer officially maintained, Long ago, NIC issued such a file on regular basis where you could update your hosts file, Now some people provide there hosts files to block advertisements, Block certain websites, or simply to fool your computer without you knowing (Malware)

The hosts file method soon became impractical, let us not get into the stages of impractical HOSTS file went through, imagine today your computer had to search a local file with many millions of hosts (Probably billions) whenever it needed to open a website, So in short, the hosts file had to go, and a new system had to replace it, that system is DNS or the domain name system.

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