The 30th Birthday of DNS!

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The 30th Birthday of DNS!

	By Dan York Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and on staff of Internet Society
	November 27, 2013 Views: 17,397 Add Comment

As Ond?ej Surý of CZ.NIC recently pointed out on the dns-operations list, it was 30 years ago this month, in November 1983, that two RFCs that defined what we now call the Domain Name System (DNS), RFC 882 and RFC 883, were published. They make for an interesting read today when you think about how far we’ve come in those 30 years—and now how absolutely critical DNS is as part of the Internet’s infrastructure.

With the days of November dwindling, I think it’s important to mark this anniversary/birthday here on CircleID, given how much DNS is a topic of conversation here. For some context about this occasion, I recently wrote a piece on the Deploy360 blog, Celebrating 30 Years Of The Domain Name System (DNS) This Month!, where I pointed out some of the early documents as well as a video of Paul Mockapetris explaining the origins of those first RFCs. My Internet Society colleague Andrei Robachevsky also shared his views in a post, Happy 30th Birthday, DNS!, where he also provides some links to studies and reports around the abuse of DNS.

As we write here at CircleID often about all the newgTLDs, DNSSEC, DNS security or other topics around domain names, I think it’s important to step back and realize how far we’ve come in 30 years. And while we talk now about the “future of identifiers” and have so many other discussions around the future of domain names, the fact remains that DNS is at the core of pretty much everything we do on the Internet today.

Happy 30th, DNS! Let’s see where the next 30 years go!

By Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and on staff of Internet Society

Dan is the Director, Online Content, for the Internet Society but opinions posted on CircleID are his own. View more of Dan’s writing and audio here.

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