A few other oddities were born out of this too. For example, major universities using two letters with a full-length alias (eg UK.AC.OX & UK.AC.OXFORD - seeing

A few other oddities were born out of this too. For example, major universities using two letters with a full-length alias (eg UK.AC.OX & UK.AC.OXFORD - seeing .ox.ac.uk is still the more common today), and also the British Library ending up outside of a top-level element 25 years before anyone else (UK.BL became bl.uk and british-library.uk). A lot of what's weird in the UK's hierarchy is simply because NRS predated DNS. (Other trivia - NRS contexts did 40 years ago, what SRV is still trying to do today. And a huge number of govt sites still serve their dns records through ja.net, which is a nice nod)