Bind 9 Administrator Reference Manual

Appendix A. Appendices
A.1. Acknowledgements
A.1.1. A Brief History of the DNS and BIND
Although the "official" beginning of the Domain Name System occurred 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 an 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 O. Kure.
BIND versions 4.9 and 4.9.1 were released by Digital Equipment Corporation (now Compaq Computer
Corporation). Paul Vixie, then a DEC employee, became BIND’s primary caretaker. Paul 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.
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 the Internet Software
Consortium with support being provided by ISC’s sponsors. As co-architects/programmers, Bob Halley
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