If you're reading this, you're doing so online and have visited the Cisco Community Forum. Thanks for visiting and reading, by the way. From a technology standpoint, to get to community.cisco.com, most folks have relied on their network having a Domain Name Server (DNS). The job of DNS is to resolve a site's name (community.cisco.com) into an IP address known to the network. Mostly, this "magic" happens behind the scenes and is taken for granted.
How did this all happen before DNS? Through a hosts.txt file. While these text files are still used today to resolve certain addresses and in the case of computers that aren't on a network with a DNS server, the text files can be used. The hosts.txt file does a similar job to the DNS system, mapping addresses to host names. For example:
hosts.txt
127.0.0.1 localhost
This maps the human-readable name "localhost" to the internet address 127.0.0.1 for the computer network to use.
That's simple enough. But again, before we had the Domain Name System in place, someone had to manage the list in a hosts.txt file. You know, back before the internet was huge and was still the ARPANET.
This week's trivia has two parts.
- What University was responsible for manually maintaining the HOSTS.TXT file for the ARPANET?
- In what year was the Domain Name System implemented?
