Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2018 December 29

= December 29 =

Very early website
https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=mit.edu tells me that the domain record for mit.edu was activated on 23 May 1985, but History of the World Wide Web tells me that the WWW was created in 1990. Assuming no typos in the domain record, how is it possible for this website to have predated the Web by several years? Gopher wasn't around until 1991, so it's not as if they imported a Gopher site's data into this website's data. Nyttend (talk) 01:11, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
 * As it says in the very first paragraph ". The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web." 1985 is when domain names were first registered, it was a way of formalizing something that already happened informally. Dmcq (talk) 01:34, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
 * [ec with your expansion of your comment] Understood, but I didn't ask that. Now I see that the history of the Domain Name System (and the entire concept of a domain name) was established long before the WWW; I'd assumed that the concept of a domain name was a sub-concept of the WWW, not something that could be meaningful without it.  Nyttend (talk) 01:41, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes. Just to point out the most familiar, email has existed since long before the WWW and it also makes use of domain names. Matt Deres (talk) 14:39, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Note for clarity that pretty much everything that operates over Internet protocol suite uses domain names in some cases as remembering IPv4 IPs can be more difficult plus handling IP changes is also difficult. Usenet, FTP, Gopher, RDP, VNC, VNC, SSH, telnet, SIP, IRC. Heck even DNS can use domain names to some extent. A key reason why websites had the www subdomain is to make it easier to handle different non www services on the same domain. Nil Einne (talk) 08:36, 30 December 2018 (UTC)