Like a phone book?
I laughed out loud when I read the title of this post. When I’m helping my customers with their domain DNS records, I always analogise DNS to “a phone book for the internet”. I love that we’ve come full circle and phone books are “DNS for the phone system” 😂 (also goddamn does this make me feel old 😭)
Best furry explains DNS cat explains DNS
What did I just watch? Like… educational content, explained by… 🤷 not at all who you would have expected. What a unique mix.
Because the phone system is old
It’s also backwards compatible to an extreme:
I remember in the early nineties I found in my grandmother’s antique store one of those old black candlestick phones that you would jiggle to ring the operator. It didn’t have a rotary dial.
I plugged it in and got dial tone. I jiggled the hook and an operator answered the phone and asked me something. I don’t remember if I hung up or talked with them.
When mobile phones came out they improved the system significantly but it was still very much old tech.
Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.
Even just switching mobile voice standards is painful, as seen in Australia recently. In theory, you just need VoLTE support to use calling over 4G, but it turns out there is a bunch of other compatibility issues like emergency calling, device software and firmware settings, and carrier side problems that complicate matters.
Because when the telephone system first was developed, all you had were dial phones, which could only send numbers 1 through 0 (10). So every call needed to be addressible using only numbers.
AT&T came up with the numbering system in the 40s…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan
I mean it’s true, but the same general concept could be said about the internet. Everything runs on IPV4 or IPV6 so they can’t use names. OP’s concept is why isn’t there say, a universal phone book that say if I punched DHORK into my phone, it would go to a server where you are listed on, return your phone number, and then my phone automatically dials you.
To which I suppose the reality is… it wouldn’t really be much of a helper. everyone would have like 3-4 digits in their usernames anyway (because any combination of real first/last names, and english words would be gone in hours of the systems introduction). So your typical registered name would be JohnSmith3821 Which isn’t that much faster to learn, write or dial than a normal 9 digit number.
