Why did hostnames get reversed?

I did some Googling and apparently my Google-fu is weak today.

I'm wondering why hostnames ended up being reversed. Ex: .com.example is now example.com.

I recall reading that the reversal happened somewhere during the development of a messaging protocol for ARPANET. com.example@user was reversed to user@example.com and then it just sort of stuck. Am I far off?

Does anyone have any resources or anecdotes that explain this at all? I think I may have even seen this explained in an HN thread once but was unsuccessful in finding it.

Thanks.

drostie 13y

The earliest RFC which I know of which spells it out is RFC 805, https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc805

      It was clear that the information
      content of all these syntactic alternatives was the same, so that
      the one causing least difficulty for existing systems should be
      chosen.  Hence it was decided to add all new information on the
      right of the @ sign, leaving the "user" field to the left
      completely to each system to determine (in particular to avoid the
      problem that some systems already use dot (.) internally as part
      of user names).

   The conclusion in this area was that the current "user@host" mailbox
   identifier should be extended to "user@host.domain" where "domain"
   could be a hierarchy of domains.
      
      In particular, the "host" field would become a "location" field
      and the structure would read (left to right) from the most
      specific to the most general.

It was chosen apparently because RFC 805 was standardizing to "mailbox@computer", and since 'mailbox' is more specific than 'computer' it became more and more specialized going left.

As for why 'mailbox' comes first, it's presumably because that's someone's username. The very first thing you want to see is, "I'm sending this to drostie," and only afterwards do you need to know where that server is located.

soberingOP13y

Thanks for your answer, much appreciated.

chiph 13y

I don't have any concrete evidence, but my guess is that having the repeating value (the TLD) at the front meant that storing domain names in a hashtable was inefficient. Lookups would be faster if the more-unique part was at the front of the string, since the string comparisons would run faster.

FlyingAvatar 13y

Wouldn't this make sense only if you weren't using a hashtable, i.e. a list or something else that had to be traversed?

scaramanga 13y

such as a trie/patricia

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