A Brief History of the DNS and BIND
Although the Domain Name
System "officially" began in 1984 with the publication of RFC 920, the
core of the new system was described in 1983 in RFCs 882 and
883. From 1984 to 1987, the ARPAnet (the precursor to today's
Internet) became a testbed of experimentation for developing the
new naming/addressing scheme in a rapidly expanding,
operational network environment. New RFCs were written and
published in 1987 that modified the original documents to
incorporate improvements based on the working model. RFC 1034,
"Domain Names-Concepts and Facilities," and RFC 1035, "Domain
Names-Implementation and Specification," were published and
became the standards upon which all DNS implementations are
built.
The first working domain name server, called "Jeeves," was
written in 1983-84 by Paul Mockapetris for operation on DEC
Tops-20
machines located at the University of Southern California's
Information
Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) and SRI International's Network
Information
Center (SRI-NIC). A DNS server for
Unix machines, the Berkeley Internet
Name Domain (BIND) package, was
written soon after by a group of
graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley
under
a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects
Administration
(DARPA).
Versions of BIND through
4.8.3 were maintained by the Computer
Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley. Douglas Terry, Mark
Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou made up the initial BIND
project team. After that, additional work on the software package
was done by Ralph Campbell. Kevin Dunlap, a Digital Equipment
Corporation
employee on loan to the CSRG, worked on BIND for 2 years, from 1985
to 1987. Many other people also contributed to BIND development
during that time: Doug Kingston, Craig Partridge, Smoot
Carl-Mitchell,
Mike Muuss, Jim Bloom and Mike Schwartz. BIND maintenance was subsequently
handled by Mike Karels and Øivind Kure.
BIND versions 4.9 and 4.9.1 were
released by Digital Equipment
Corporation (which became Compaq Computer Corporation and eventually merged with Hewlett-Packard). Paul Vixie, then
a DEC employee, became BIND's
primary caretaker. He was assisted
by Phil Almquist, Robert Elz, Alan Barrett, Paul Albitz, Bryan
Beecher, Andrew
Partan, Andy Cherenson, Tom Limoncelli, Berthold Paffrath, Fuat
Baran, Anant Kumar, Art Harkin, Win Treese, Don Lewis, Christophe
Wolfhugel, and others.
In 1994, BIND version 4.9.2 was sponsored by
Vixie Enterprises. Paul
Vixie became BIND's principal
architect/programmer.
BIND versions from 4.9.3 onward
have been developed and maintained
by Internet Systems Consortium and its predecessor,
the Internet Software Consortium, with support provided
by ISC's sponsors.
As co-architects/programmers, Bob Halley and
Paul Vixie released the first production-ready version of
BIND version 8 in May 1997.
BIND version 9 was released in September 2000 and is a
major rewrite of nearly all aspects of the underlying
BIND architecture.
BIND versions 4 and 8 are officially deprecated.
No additional development is done
on BIND version 4 or BIND version 8.
BIND development work is made
possible today by the sponsorship
of corporations who purchase professional support services from ISC
(https://www.isc.org/contact/) and/or donate to our mission, and by the tireless efforts of
numerous individuals.