Connecting the Dot-Com

The year is 1995. The internet starts going mainstream and the
dot-com bubble begins its rapid inflation. But 10 years before
all of this, a small team of systems administrators made a
seemingly simple decision that would turn out to have a
monumental impact on these events and would set the course of the
internet for the foreseeable future. 

Dr. W. Joseph Campbell sets the stage for our season on the
internet in 1995. Claire L. Evans explains how hard it was to
find anything on the early internet. One team was charged with
compiling that information in the early days of the ARPANET.
Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler recounts being the internet’s sole
librarian in those early days, and how she helped come up with
the rules for future domain names. Paul Mockapetris describes
designing the domain name system they later implemented as the
internet went from a public network to a private business. And
Ben Tarnoff explains the results of that increasingly privatized
internet.


If you want to read up on some of our research on the domain name
system (DNS), you can check out all our bonus material over at
redhat.com/commandlineheroes. 

Follow along with the episode transcript.