by [TC]²
A monthly column of technology rambling, rumination and reality
By: Jud Early, Corporate Vice President, Research, [TC]²
What’s in a name?
John Jones, Sally Smith, 704 Hauser Street, for each name there is an entity. As we meet people we know, it is customary and polite to say “hello” and usually couple the greeting with the name of the person. Over our lifetime we meet thousands of people, visit many places and associate names with objects both tangible and intangible to help us remember the name so that it can be recalled instantly as needed. As we age, some of the instantaneous recall diminishes until eventually we meet someone we know and suddenly find that we can no longer call the name we have used with such familiarity for so long.
Even though we may have associated “John Smith” with Pocahontas to make it easy to remember, how easy is it to remember Pocahontas? What if John’s name had been 192873645? Hello, 1928..uh, uh, 43… Too late, 192873645 was disappointed that you didn’t remember his name. Even worse, you forgot 283746015 too! And she will never forgive you. Married to 192873645 for all those years, and oh, the good times we had enjoyed with both. She felt snubbed, and you didn’t mean to do it. Wouldn’t this be hard? Shame on you, 23865471294!!!
The Social Security number has become, against the desires of many, including the United States Government, the ubiquitous identification number that allows the medical community to identify and treat you, and the insurance community to identify you to avoid payment as much as possible. What if we only had to remember the Social Security number of everyone, and not have to remember names? Well, we would know that there are nine digits. It would also be a bit easier with the two dashes that are customarily placed between the third and fourth digit and the fifth and sixth digit. Why, I can even remember my wife’s SSN without referring to anything. This is not so hard. But we have many friends and family, business associates, and people we meet for the first time. Suddenly it is hard. John Smith (Pocahontas) may be OK after all.
As one who works in and studies technology of many different areas of interest, understanding how things work comes naturally to me. I’m sometimes amused when I find simple things that still impress, and want to kick myself for not having thought of it before. Simple things for simple minds, as they say…
One of the things that we all take for granted is the ease with which we find things on the World Wide Web, or communicate with e-mail. As a reader of this column, you are obviously versed in the fine art of web surfing. You are currently visiting 192.220.116.62. Multiply that series of numbers by ten, or one hundred, or one thousand and you will appreciate what our Internet forefathers did for us. The Internet Protocol or IP address is actually a group of up to twelve digits. The address above contains only eleven digits, and could contain fewer. What’s important is that just as we associate John Smith with Pocahontas, the Internet employs Domain Name Servers (DNS) to associate a familiar name with the IP address. You might find it interesting to know just how this is done.
For those of you who may have learned programming in assembly language, bits and bytes should not be foreign terms. In order to keep this story as simple as possible, I’ll not explain more than is necessary, but may do a story in a later month that rounds out that bit of knowledge. Let me hear if you want more on bits and bytes. For now, suffice it to say that a bit is represented by either an “on” state, or an “off” state; either a “1” or a “0”. A byte is usually eight bits, arranged in a sequence ranging from 00000000 to 11111111. There are no other values in a binary system. One eight-bit byte can represent a maximum decimal number of 255.
The computer works with binary numbers, and the IP address is actually expressed in binary internally. However, for humans to quickly read, type and interpret, the number system used for IP addressing is known as dotted decimal notation. The address consists of four bytes of three decimal numbers separated by a “.” (dot). The entire Internet is known as 0.0.0.0. The highest address is 255.255.255.255 . An I/P address can be expressed as a string of thirty-two contiguous ones or zeros. Try remembering or even checking for correctness when a number is expressed as 10010001000010100010001000000011. You’ll soon need an eye chart! The binary number in the previous sentence can be expressed as 145.10.34.3 . That makes reading and writing much easier.
Still, with the “shorthand” method of dotted decimal notation it would be hard to deal with if that were the only way to address our individual computers and printers on the network or internet. Domain Name Servers to the rescue! You may have a DNS resolver file in your computer. Most users don’t know, nor do they care. However, if you are the curious type, it can be found from the command line by typing ipconfig/displayDNS. This applies to Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional. Sorry, Mac owners! Even if you do have a DNS resolver on your computer, the network to which you are connected is the more likely place for a local domain name server. The ISP, (your internet service provider) and each node on the internet backbone have DNS services that allow the person sitting at a computer, distant from the ISP, to simply type in the name of the site, ending with the proper extension, such as .com, .org.,.gov,..edu, etc. With earlier browsers the site name had to be prefixed with “http:// www”. With later browsers, it is often not necessary to type the “www”, but most of us do so out of habit from the earlier days of browsing the web.
The DNS quickly looks up the I/P address based on the name that was typed into the browser address line, and after expressing the name as an IP address, begins connecting the requesting computer to the host server where the address is pointing. The request may pass through a number of servers located broadly across the US, or the entire globe, and with routing instructions that specify how the data packets are to travel, the maximum number of “hops” and a time before the message is to die, the request is sent to the host server and the server returns the requested page to the IP address from which the browser request had come. This quick, easy, and transparent functionality is taken for granted. For those early users of ARPANET, the need to type in addresses in dotted decimal was routine.
We have witnessed a rapid transformation over the past ten years. In 1993, the average citizen was barely aware of the Internet. One who wanted to access the Internet usually dialed into an access point, and from there, was required to enter the dotted decimal IP address of the exact server with which to connect. Archie was then used to find the file with content that you needed. Archie maintained a database of file names stored on all public archive sites, and could tell you where a file was stored. When searching for specific information contained in a file, an application often used was WAIS, or Wide Area Information Server. Then, if you were lucky enough to find what you were seeking, FTP, or File Transfer Protocol was used to bring the file to your computer. Gopher was another tool that had a brief life as a file and retrieval search tool.
April 22, 1993 marks the date that the first graphical browser for the Internet was released. The Mosaic browser, by Marc Andreesen and others broke new ground in finding information, presenting both text and images. This early browser formed the basis for the Netscape Navigator browser. Today, Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla, as well as a few lesser known browsers are at our disposal. Google, the mother of all search tools provides unbelievable power when coupled with a browser, or imbedded in a host application. We need only a name, or key word, to find a treasure trove of information.
Although the four byte dotted decimal IP address can support more than 16,000,000 hosts, and each can assign tens of thousands of domain sub-addresses, there is a real danger of running out of IP addresses. Standards are now evolving that will utilize 128 bit IP addresses, as compared to the 32 bit IP addresses now in use. This will provide more than a trillion addresses that can reside on the Internet. “So what?”, you ask. We are beginning to see consumer electronics connected to the Internet today. With smart appliances, your refrigerator and coffee pot may one day have their own unique name, in your household domain. I can’t wait for my toaster to send e-mail to my television.
This note is posted in the library at www.techexchange.com . When you key in the site name to visit us, give some thought to the magic that goes on behind the scenes. We owe much to the early developers of the medium that allows all of us to express our thoughts publicly, and to find and obtain the thoughts of others with such ease.
Note: Trade names used in this article are the property of their respective owners
Next month: Neutrinos and other small stuff