I am born in 1999, I remember having to write “www.” before my website in the address bar otherwise it would not work. Later in elementary school it no longer needed to be done to access the website. What happened?
In: Technology
This is about the Domain Name System. This is what translates “reddit.com” into an IP address that a computer can use to actually understand and route, sort of like a phone book translating a business name into a phone number.
Back in the old days, you just had a record for “a.b.c” = 10.11.12.13. That worked great originally when you would just setup a server with a web server and mail server and everything you needed. However, eventually we wanted to start putting the mail server on a separate box that would be dedicated to it.
But now here’s the problem. If you email [email protected], that message is going to go to the server that `example.com` represents. That means you need to specifically route `example.com` to the mail server to keep it working. If you want the web server separate, you need to distinguish it. That’s where the `www` comes in. It gives you a separate address that you can point to the web server and have everything work.
There was an invention that helped in the 90s with this — the MX record. Basically, the DNS protocol allowed you to specifically request the Mail Server for a given address. This is what is used all the time today. It did take some time to roll out though, so many websites still had to have their main `example.com` domain point to a mail server, and maybe had a small web server on the same box that redirected to `www`. It’s the equivalent to having a phone book listing for a business having separate numbers for different departments.
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