5 ms·

> As for the part that is just wrong, there’s never been an internet where you had to know the connection address (there were periodically updated host files)

> As for the part that is just wrong, there’s never been an internet where you had to know the connection address (there were periodically updated host files) Not necessarily. If your Internet connection was via KA9Q NOS over a DOS packet driver running SLFP (the predecessor to SLIP), you had to keep your own hosts file, and people would trade things like Scott Yannoff's list. If you look at http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/gnu/funet/historical-funet-gnu-area-from-early-1990s/inet-services.txt http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/gnu/funet/historical-funet-gnu... for example, they'd list IP addresses and ports because some users didn't have systems connected to DNS. People aren't talking about Telnet(23/tcp) as a protocol, they use that terminology because the command-line unix "telnet" client when connecting to a non-Telnet-service (meaning doesn't exchange WILL/WONT handshakes etc) on another port, it effectively acted like netcat. So if there was a cool game listening on 10.123.45.6 port 2000, people would type "telnet 10.123.45.6 2000" to connect to the game from many places.

wrs 5y ago
I never understood why that sort of list wasn’t just a hosts file. But I wasn’t really involved in the SLFP world; maybe it didn’t support hosts files? I guess my POV is that before DNS was introduced, the Internet had a hosts file you were expected to keep up to date, and after DNS, if you didn’t have DNS, what you had wasn’t quite “the Internet”.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > the Internet had a hosts file you were expected to keep up to date I wasn't online back then so don't take my word for it, but my understanding is that different people maintained different hosts files. There was not a single Internet-wide hosts file, although one of these hosts files was somewhat more popular than others (due to who was maintaining it).
  - wrs 5y ago
    I used the Internet at CMU during the pre-DNS era, and my recollection is that the official hosts file came from SRI-NIC (this is corroborated by the ICANN history [0]). [0] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/rssac-023-04nov16-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/rssac-023-04nov1...
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  I think the sort of list you want is in /etc/services

wrs 5y ago

I never understood why that sort of list wasn’t just a hosts file. But I wasn’t really involved in the SLFP world; maybe it didn’t support hosts files? I guess my POV is that before DNS was introduced, the Internet had a hosts file you were expected to keep up to date, and after DNS, if you didn’t have DNS, what you had wasn’t quite “the Internet”.

southerntofu 5y ago
> the Internet had a hosts file you were expected to keep up to date I wasn't online back then so don't take my word for it, but my understanding is that different people maintained different hosts files. There was not a single Internet-wide hosts file, although one of these hosts files was somewhat more popular than others (due to who was maintaining it).
- wrs 5y ago
  I used the Internet at CMU during the pre-DNS era, and my recollection is that the official hosts file came from SRI-NIC (this is corroborated by the ICANN history [0]). [0] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/rssac-023-04nov16-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/rssac-023-04nov1...
tinus_hn 5y ago
I think the sort of list you want is in /etc/services