Here's some information about HOSTS.TXT from Jake Feinler, formerly of
SRI-NIC.
Alex.
> The SRI NIC registered hosts and maintained the official list of host
> names from 1970 up until the SRI NIC ceased to exist in Oct. 1992. At
> that time naming and addressing activities were turned over to NSI and
> SRI was no longer involved.
>
> However, I am not sure what the IETF discussion is referring to.
> HOSTS.TXT was originally an official file that hosts needed to load onto
> their machines to identify hostnames in headers. The file became too big
> for many machines, and there was network congestion due to everyone
> trying to download the file from the SRI machine. Consequently, some
> hosts started maintaining only a small subset of host names for sites
> with which they frequently communicated. Obviously that was a bad
> solution to the problem.
>
> Then the NIC provided a server that allowed one to refresh one's host
> tables automatically and/or query the server on the fly for a given
> hostname. This service was replicated at ISI and BBN (maybe other sites
> - I can't remember), and these additional servers refreshed their host
> tables from the NIC. Finally the network went to the domain naming
> system; however, SRI-NIC still continued to provide the official naming
> registration and distribution service for the Internet until we went
> offline.
>
> I left SRI in Sept. 1989. The NIC contract lasted until Oct. 1992. Dr.
> Jose Garcia-Luna, now at UC Santa Cruz, was leading the group until the
> contract ended. Mary Stahl and Sue Romano headed up the Name Service, so
> these people could give the definitive answer to the question asked.
