A Short History of Chaosnet

Looking into DNS records, you’ll find a trace of a little-known LAN-only protocol… which postdates early TCP/IP but is unrelated to it:

The only really visible remnant of Chaosnet is the CH DNS class. There’s something about that fact that I find strangely fascinating. The CH class is a vestigial ghost of an alternative network protocol in a world that has long since settled on TCP/IP. It’s exciting, at least to me, to know that the last traces of Chaosnet still lurk out there in the infrastructure of our networked society. The CH DNS class is a fun artifact of digital archaeology. But it’s also a living reminder that the internet was not born fully formed, that TCP/IP is not the only way to connect computers to each other, and that “the internet” is far from the coolest name we could have had for our global communication system.

via an HN discussion on a look into the history of the 8 bit byte.

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That’s a great blog - sadly a tad dormant ATM.