Much of the Internet can be traced back to UNIX traditions. We like things to be organized in a hierarchy, much like a filesystem. And, since we puny humans are

Much of the Internet can be traced back to UNIX traditions. We like things to be organized in a hierarchy, much like a filesystem. And, since we puny humans are better at remembering names than numbers, we give our computers names. Combine the two concepts, and we end up with a hierarchy of names. And because all of the computers in the world are connected to this global hierarchy, TLDs were introduced to add some order to the chaos. By introducing TLDs, we were able to start to categorize companies from universities from network infrastructure providers, etc... and thus everyone could find their place in the global name hierarchy. Even the TLDs are part of a single root object in the hierarchy(.). It wasn't until things started to scale that we had issues with domains.