Have you noticed that Industry insiders like to invent their own language? You are following along in a fascinating conversation about some interesting aspect of something and just when it is all coming together and you can sense a real strong point being made, the speaker looses you completely on some strange term or phrase or, god forbid, acronym that they just assume everyone must grok*.
Tech sector is infamous for an over reliance on short hand terms and acronyms who’s only definition are even more obscure terms or acronyms. These little words have become an invisible wall, in my opinion. If you are in the Online Marketing industry, wouldn’t you like to have your ideas and thoughts included in the conversation instead of dismissed out of hand because you aren’t using the exact correct word in context? It is something that really worries me about my industry.
I’d like to help the outsiders get back into the conversation. Maybe this post is a start, I don’t know.
Domain names are something I think most of us use and have some familiarity with. If you are in Online Marketing, domain names are a big part of your business. Online business strategy, too, needs to know about domain names. But most don’t really know what they are because they cannot explain them to their mother (my golden rule for when you really understand something)
Lets get started. First, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, domain names have one and only one function on this earth. They take an internet address that is written in numbers and is easy for a computer to read and they convert that into characters that are easier for humans to read. That is the sum total of what they were invented for.
Addresses: So imagine that its 1918 and the modern US postal service is just getting off the ground. They need a way for Americans to send a letter across the country without instructions like ‘go find Bob Jones somewhere in Seattle’. They come up with a system of codes where, from specific to general, you can identify any house in the country. Exact same is true of Internet Addresses, where general to specific (reading left to right) you can find any computer on the internet. Im telling you, as a Cisco Network Engineer in a former life, anyone who tells you it is more complicated than that is confusing the point.
Domain names early on: So clearly and IP address like 192.168.0.1 doesn’t mean much to most people. We kinda got stuck in the telecom industry when we only gave people 9 digits on their phones, forcing them to remember long strings of numbers which had no real meaning to them personally. Lame attempts to map letters to digits like 1-800-CALLBOB didnt really help much. Learning from their mistake, computer people realized they needed a more flexible way to related these internet addresses to the actual people who were being the computers. This is the important bit. Internet Addresses were for the benefit of the computers themselves, but domain names were designed only for people; the computers could have cared less about them. They came up with a very simple idea, keep a list that maps an IP address like 192.168.0.1 to one or more words that people can remember. In the early days this was all it was. An IP address pointed to a computer, lets say it was physically at the University of Berkley computer lab. Someone decided that computer’s name was Pinky. They updated to shared list on the internet to say that, hey if you are trying to send a message or call that computer in the Berkley lab, just remember its name is Pinky. Bada-bing, you now have the start of domain names (host names, actually, but the same purpose). The human types in a command to send something to Pinky, that computer doesn’t know where Pinky is, but knows where the list is to look it up. It finds the IP and sends the message
Modern Domain names: From these humble beginnings, modern domain’s were born. If someone handed you a list like the one above, mapping ip addresses to single words like Pinky, you might be cool with it in the beginning. Small number of computers, and even smaller number of people on the internet making up the names for these computers means its not too difficult to keep up to date. But we all know that didn’t last, the number of computers and people on the internet grew, and grew quickly. Soon there were ten different people, in different locations, fighting over calling their computer Pinky. No problem, we will add a new level, call that the domain name, and make it something geographic or organizationally relative. So now pinky.berkley is a completely different computer from pinky.darpa. Do ya one better, since Berkley the college was getting nasty emails from Berkley the pizza parlor who also wants to have their computers online, we will throw in another layer that separates domain names into educational, companies, government, and others as needed. pinky.berkley.edu is a completely different computer from pinky.berkley.com Problem solved. These new names are now organized just the way computer people like it. There are now plenty of names to go around, just get creative and have fun. The name land grab begins. Ok, but now bob who maintains the list is getting sick of it and anyway, isn’t this what computers are good at?
Domain servers: Fine fine fine, if bob doesn’t want to keep up the list that says pinky.berkley.edu points to 192.168.0.1, we’ll use computers to do it for us. Lucky for us, because we setup those layers of host name, domain name and TLD or top level domain, we can do something cool that we call distributed responsibility. So in modern domain name lookup, it all still starts with a list, just like the beginning. That list, now, no longer tells you the IP address of pinky.berkley.edu though. It tells you where you can ask to find out, kinda like asking the guy on the corner for directions and he telling you to go ask that other guy cuz he grew up in this neighborhood. So at the top there are dozens of servers, run by governments and large non-profits that keep the list of who to ask for a domain. Their responsibility is broken up by the TLD, or the end of the domain like .edu or .com If you want Pinky.berkley.edu you ask server A but if you want Pinky.berkley.com you ask server B. This is why it is kinda a big deal when governing bodies approve a new TLD because its is a pseudo monopoly on all those people waking up to the corner asking for directions. So server A looks up in its list and says, for the IP address of a computer in the berkley.edu domain, go ask this server at 192.168.0.2 the computer says to itself, ok thanks for nothing, and goes to ask that other server about the IP for pinky. Here is the magic. That IP address that the top domain server gave you points to a server that the guys at Berkley university control. They keep the list themselves, handing out the IP addresses they rent from their Internet Service Provider. Thing is, since they control the specific list on berkley.edu, it is up to them to name their servers whatever they want.
Web addresses: The web is a more recent invention compared to the internet, and as such its web site names borrows from the domain name idea above. You have your TLD, like .com, and you have your domain name, like berkley. You also have a host name, only usually it is www instead of pinky. That part gets you to the server. The rest is suppose to get you to a specific file on the server. So http://www.berkley.edu/directory/on/server/fall_classes.doc is a combination of the server you are looking for and the location on that server of where to file and finally the name of the file you want. That http part in the beginning is kinda your native language, like when you walk up to a stranger in the airport and say ‘you speak English?’
That’s domain names in a nutshell. I hope this has helped.
I’d like to do one of these each Tuesday, but I need your suggestions.
What tech subject would you like translated into English? Email me at aaron@sazbean.com
* An example of a word I struggled with early in my tech career because it is just assumed you have read Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to ‘understand’ something.
photo attributed to polandeze