Eric Germann wrote:
At 09:53 AM 6/10/98 -0700, Michael Dillon wrote:
The MITRE Corporation registered mitre.org in 1985 and the Aerospace Corporation registered aero.org in 1987. This idea that .ORG was only for non-profit organizations is an example of historical revisionism propogated by people who were not there at the time the TLDs were created.
Well, if one draws ones references from "DNS and BIND" (First Edition) by Albitz and Liu, which is widely accepted as a definitive resource on DNS, on page 21, the refer to .org as "Non-commercial organizations, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org)". This is further propogated in the Second Edition on page 18.
RFC 1591 which defines it as a miscellaneous TLD came along two years later.
RFC 920 (1984) defines it for domains that don't fall under the .COM, .NET, .GOV, etc, singling out commercial entities for .COM exclusively. That kinda leaves .org for noncommercials by inference.
Well, yes, but RFC1366 also says hosts with >32 subnets and 4096 hosts qualify for a Class B. :) When I want to go back and look at "what used to be" (the good old days) I grab my red book. I got it from SRI.. they published it in 1992. They list: COM This is the domain for commercial businesses and organizations that make a profit through a service or sale a product[sic]. This is the largest top-level domain. EDU This domain is for degree-granting educational institutions, such as colleges; universities; community colleges; libraries; research institutes; astronomical observatories; (blah blah). GOV This domain is for non-military national government organizations, e.g. Veterans Administration, Department of Energy, national laboaratories such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. State governments also fit under this domain at the second-level, e.g. CA.GOV or HAWAII.GOV. State agencies should be registered at the third level, e.g. WATER-DEPARTMENT.CA.GOV[...] MIL This is the domain for U.S. military organizations. [...] NET This is the domain for backbone systems - NICs, NOCs, gateways, etc. Only machines necessary for the actual operation of the network can be registered within this domain. ORG This is the domain for not-for-profit organizations. Any profit-making organization does not belong in this domain. It is also for technical- support groups; professional societies and associations; and computer users' groups. ORG also exists as a parent to subdomains that do not clearly fall under the other top-level domains. US The US domain is a top-level domain created for people in the US who have computers at home, or small local corporations who wanted to register their hosts geographically.
Then again, there used to be a requirement to have OPERATIONAL name servers when registering a domain, but that seems to have gotten historically revised away also when $$$ entered the picture. But I digress...
Yeah. I actually talked with someone this AM about that. I think I'm going to walk the DNS again to look for lame servers. I'll post a summary here whenever I get around to doing it. :) -jamie /12-line sigfile deleted -- jamie rishaw (dal/efnet:gavroche) American Information Systems, Inc. rdm: "Religion is obsolete." gsr: "By what?" jgr: "Solaris." (1996) Tel:312.425.7140, FAX:312.425.7240