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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 30, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 26
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Breaking News -
Networking:
DNS Celebrates Its 20th
Birthday
Nominum, a pioneering provider of IP address infrastructure software, is
commemorating the 20th anniversary of the invention of the domain name system
(DNS). Dr. Paul Mockapetris, the company's chief scientist and chairman,
developed the protocol that all Internet users depend on for sending email and
locating web resources. The first use of the DNS took place on June 23, 1983
at the University of Southern California School of Engineering's Information
Sciences Institute (ISI). Dr. Mockapetris is now working towards the next
generation of the DNS to accommodate the growth of IP computing and future
applications, such as IP telephony and radio frequency identification (RFID)
tags, that will depend on the system.
In 1983, Dr. Mockapetris and the late Dr. Jonathan Postel, director of the
Computer Networks division at ISI, recognized the need for a global database
of computer names and collaborated on the system as part of a pre-Internet
project. Twenty years after its invention, DNS is essential to the Internet.
All Internet users depend on DNS every time they access a web URL or send an
e-mail message, because the system translates words into the numbers needed to
locate Internet resources.
As the world's largest and busiest distributed database, the DNS handles
billions of requests every day and was the first proof that database
replication could be invisible and reliable on a global scale. With every
e-mail message sent or URL viewed, a request is made to multiple name servers
scattered all over the globe. Today, enterprises depend on Dr. Mockapetris'
invention to keep their online business operations running without
interruption. Without DNS, the Internet would shut down very quickly.
"A billion users will touch the DNS this year, and some won't even know it
because they simply placed an internet phone call or looked at a Web page, or
bought a package with an RFID tag, and the growth in its usage will continue
to be explosive," noted Dr. Mockapetris. "In the next five years, I expect to
see a dramatic increase in the number of ways in which the DNS is used,
reaching far beyond what we have seen in the past twenty."
Dr. Mockapetris was honored with this year's prestigious IEEE (Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Internet Award for his invention of the
DNS in collaboration with the late Dr. Postel. As a visiting scholar at the
Postel Center, established by the Information Sciences Institute of the
University of Southern California, Dr. Mockapetris is currently experimenting
on future applications for the DNS. His decision to join Nominum in 1999
marked Dr. Mockapetris's renewed focus on DNS and IP addressing and the
potential it holds for the future of the Internet.
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