BBC NEWS | Technology | Net pioneer predicts web future
In 1983, Dr Paul Mockapetris created the now familiar system which gives net pages names such as ".com" and ".uk".
Celebrating DNS's 21st birthday he says: "Ten years from now, we will look back at the net and think how could we have been so primitive."
All communication will be over the net, he predicts, and we will no longer need phone numbers, just web addresses.
"Ten years from now, we will wonder how it was so hard to find things on the network too," he told BBC News Online.
"At best we are at the Bronze Age, we are not even at the Iron Age stage in the network."
'Laboratory curiosity'
Dr Mockapetris came up with the DNS system 21 years ago while he was a scientist on the Arpanet project, part of Darpa (US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency), which provided the basis of the net.
The system meant codes attached to information could be translated into easy-to-remember web addresses and domains, which people could own.
We have a notion about what nature should be like, the way it was 1,000 years ago for example, with no pollution. From the standpoint of cyberspace and the net, we don't have the benefit of any natural starting point so we have to construct the future
Dr Paul Mockapetris
The net, wh
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