[e2e] What if there were no well known numbers?

[John Day]

At 12:46 -0700 2006/08/04, Bob Braden wrote:
>At 10:39 PM 8/2/2006 -0400, David P. Reed wrote:
>
>>The concept of "well-known ports" was built for a world in which 
>>there was no lookup function, no DNS - in fact for a world where 
>>people typed addresses in octal, long before there was a naming 
>>service (even before the hosts file).
>
>
>Well, not exactly.  It was (deliberately) built for a world in which 
>we did not want increased communication fragility resulting
>  from DNS lookup failures.  Maybe that concern no longer seems real, 
>but it was the concern.

DNS had not even been dreamed of when well-known sockets were put in 
place.  It was a quick fix to get ready for ICCC '72.  These are 
after the fact excuses to maintain the status quo.

John