In a recent email on the DNS operations mailing list, it was noted by Ondřej Surý that the RFC 882 and 883

(The two RFC’s that defined what we now call DNS- the domain name system) had been published in November 1983. That means that this month we are celebrating 30 years of DNS. It is incredible to think about how far it as come over the past 30 years, and how critical it now is to the current Internet infrastructure.

DNS makes the Internet easy. In an interview with Paul Mockapetris, (co-inventer of the Internet Domain Name System), he explains how and why DNS was invented.

Happy Birthday DNS, we love you!!

What is DNS?
DNS stands for Domain Name Service.
It’s like the white page directory for the Internet. You supply a name, it supplies a number. The name in this case is specifically a hostname and the number is an IP address. Without it you would have to remember every IP address of every website you want to visit. With over 300 million websites on the web, remembering every IP address would be utterly impossible, well unless maybe you’re Kim Peek: The Real Rain Man.