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.