Re: Blast from the past

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com>]

danmcd at ENG.SUN.COM (Dan McDonald) writes:
> In article <Pine.HPX.4.02.10101251902520.10069-100000 at diablo.cisco.com>,
> Ole J. Jacobsen <ole at cisco.com> wrote:
> 
> <SNIP!>
> >I think NATs should be loaded with the final copy of HOSTS.TXT
> >and assign names on the net 10 side accordingly...
> 
> Speaking of that, does anyone know where one could find a copy (final,
> historical, or otherwise) of HOSTS.TXT?  I barely remember huge /etc/hosts
> files, and it would be historically interesting to peruse, I think.

I'm curious when HOSTS.TXT finally died completely.

I had a machine at Bellcore that I used for hosting a couple of
mailing lists, and I (well, it -- I automated the process) was still
periodically downloading HOSTS.TXT off of SRI-NIC.ARPA (I think) as
late as '88 or maybe even early '89 if I'm not totally
hallucinating. The machine ran DNS just fine, but not every user's
mail host was in the DNS so I just made sure to have both sets of data
available. I also vaguely recall needing to worry about Bitnet gateway
machines in the sendmail configs and similar goo.

Amazing how long the DNS transition took....

Perry