[HECnet] DECdns

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

> On May 28, 2016, at 11:00 PM, Mark Abene <phiber at phiber.com> wrote:
> 
> DECdns serves a similar purpose to the real DNS, except it's
> specifically for resolving DECnet node names to node addresses.

That's a small part of what DECdns aimed to do.  The bigger part (and something that "real" DNS still struggles with) was to provide a fault tolerant, distributed, dynamically updated name-address mapping.

At the time DECdns was designed, the Internet's DNS was basically just a text file connected to a trivial daemon, with updates done by sending new versions of those text files around.  That was roughly the same level of primitiveness that the DECnet Phase II through IV node name mappings had.  DECdns delivered a distributed database with automatic machinery for distributing updates reliably.

	paul