While domains may sound like an ever-existing component of the World Wide Web to the generation of the day¸ it was indeed a great milestone achieved by researchers, engineers and internet users from all over the world. The World Wide Web we know today would have been much different or should we say ‘complex’, if domains did not exist. So what is the history of domains and how important are they?
It was in the 1960’s when computer connections were first established.
ARPANET involved the connection of several Wide Area Network’s (WAN’s) for example. The need for a system to identify various computers on the network was felt for the first time during those years. In the beginning, there were not many computers in the network operated and managed by the United States Department of Defense. As numbers grew, it became necessary to devise a mechanism for the management and regulation of domain paths in a computer network.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Agency or IANA was created during the year 1972.
The United States Defense Information Systems Agency created IANA in order to handle the task of assigning unique identification numbers to all nodes or computers on the internet. Within a year, the Internet Protocol addressing system or IP addressing system was adopted by all agencies and private bodies, and accepted as a common standard. By the end of the year 1973, Internet Protocol became a popular standard. In the next few years, the internet went through a quick expansion with the arrival of newsgroups and e-mail. These two services completely revolutionized the internet and made it useful for a large number of organizations.
As the number of computers connected to the internet grew exponentially, researches felt the need for a simple addressing system instead of the existing system that involved long and confusing IP addresses.
Technicians and researchers came up with the brilliant idea of ‘Name Server’ during the year 1984.
Now, it was not necessary to memorize long and confusing addresses or complex domain paths to various computer systems on the network. That was the beginning of the modern day domain system. Within a year, another big milestone was achieved by researchers when the DNS or Domain Name System was finally implemented. At that time¸ only 3 top domains were introduced. These domains were .com, .org and .net. All of a sudden, long and confusing Internet Protocol addresses were reduced to short and easily to remember names like Microsoft (dot) com. The commercial growth of the internet skyrocket in early 1990s.
Tim Berners-Lee and CERN made a historic contribution to the world of technology by releasing the World Wide Web we know today. It was during the same time that a commercial service provider company started managing domain registration services. While domain registration was subsidized in the beginning, it became a paid service by the end of 1995.