Creation of `HOSTS.TXT`

Elizabeth 'Jake' Feinler and her team at the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI began manually maintaining a single text file, `HOSTS.TXT`, to map hostnames to IP addresses for the ARPANET.

Significance

This was the pioneering, albeit unscalable, solution to human-friendly network addressing and highlighted the eventual need for a distributed system like DNS.

Key facts

Year
1973
Type
invention
Location
SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA