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I always assumed that the www subdomain was the phase's solution for the problem of limited resources, and to reinforce that something used the Web, rather than

• e1ven 17y ago
  The is a few reasons that I know of, all of which are historical. The first is that "www" or "web" were physical hosts in the company's network. These hosts ran the public webserver, but you might also see Spock, Nemoy and Sarek as developer workstations. Every machine had a subdomain, and www happened to be the one that ran the web software. Note that web.archive.org, for instance, still resolves, as does web.altavista.com The second reason is/was politeness. It was viewed as an improper use of resources to sent traffic directly to domain.com.. The reason for this is that all domain.com requests need to go up to the top-level DNS servers, where-as subdomain.domain.com will request using your local servers (ns1.domain.com, ns2.domain.com). Thinking about it today, I'm not sure how much savings there'd really be.. You'd still need to ask the root servers what the IPs were for the domain's DNS servers, but it was viewed by my friends at the time as the politer option. Finally, and I think this was the biggest one.. Today, we think of the web AS the internet.. That was very much not the case 15 years ago. The web was among the many services that ran on the internet, and people planned accordingly. domain.com is the root for ALL of that's company's internet efforts. It shouldn't resolve to the web site, any more than it should resolve to the Nameserver, Mail servers, or Usenet servers. They're all co-equal services.
  • taw 17y ago
    DNS addresses are not computers. IP addresses are not computers. Forwarding traffic to different machines by port is trivial.