In the 1960's computers began connecting to each other over wide area networks, the United States Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) was one of the first of these networks to be created . ARPAnet tested new networking technologies and started to link many universities, research centres and government agencies. In 1972 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) was created by a man called John Postel, he was responsible for the unique IP addresses assigned to each computer connected to the network.
Initially it was a text file that mapped all the network resources published via an FTP server (hosted by the Stanford Research Institute), this gave the information regarding the location of each computer, including the Hostname & IP address. Users would retrieve this file and store it on their local server. Whenever a new machine was added to their network the user would need to send an email to SRI, all the information for every new machine was then stored until SRI published a new release of the text file. As you can imagine the scalability of this system caused major problems, also with greater numbers of users connecting throughout the 70's the use of IP numbers fast became unpopular. The IP address (e.g. 62.64.31.149) is not that easy to remember nor does it represent any geographical information.
In the early 1980's Dr. David Mills, John Postel, Zaw-Sing Su & Dr. Paul Mockapetris were all involved in the development of the Domain Name System (DNS). The domain name system allowed organisations to have meaningful names for paths to their systems. For a number of years this domain name system evolved steadily and functioned very much as back-office support to the operation of the network. In 1990 ARPAnet was retired and by that time had grown to over 100,000-networked computers.
An official registry or Network Information Centre (NIC) must register all domain names. Nominet UK, for example, registers all .uk domains. The .uk domain was first used back in the 1980's when a non-profit group, the "Naming Committee" was in charge of the registration of .uk domains. The early 1990's saw the explosion of the Internet into the commercial sector, which preceded the World Wide Web. At this time companies such as Demon, Pipex & BT emerged as Internet service providers and so started to sell domain names on a commercial level. As the demand for domain names grew the Naming Committee was unable to keep up with requests, this is when Nominet UK was formed to register .uk domains.
Every country has a national registry, and each registry has its own top-level domain, otherwise known as their "two-letter country code".
Examples of these top-level domains are:
.us United States
.uk United Kingdom
.ie Ireland
.fr France
.de Germany
.it Italy
The Internet Corporation oversees global Top Level Domains (gTLD) such as .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is the non-profit corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions previously performed under U.S. Government contract by IANA and other entities.
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