Eric Germann wrote:
>The MITRE Corporation registered mitre.org in 1985 and the Aerospace
>Corporation registered aero.org in 1987. This idea that .ORG was only for
>non-profit organizations is an example of historical revisionism
>propogated by people who were not there at the time the TLDs were created.Well, if one draws ones references from "DNS and BIND" (First Edition) by
Albitz and Liu, which is widely accepted as a definitive resource on DNS,
on page 21, the refer to .org as "Non-commercial organizations, like the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org)". This is further propogated in
the Second Edition on page 18.RFC 1591 which defines it as a miscellaneous TLD came along two years later.
RFC 920 (1984) defines it for domains that don't fall under the .COM, .NET,
.GOV, etc, singling out commercial entities for .COM exclusively. That
kinda leaves .org for noncommercials by inference.
Well, yes, but RFC1366 also says hosts with >32 subnets and 4096 hosts
qualify for a Class B. 
When I want to go back and look at "what used to be" (the good old days)
I grab my red book. I got it from SRI.. they published it in 1992.
They list:
COM
This is the domain for commercial businesses and organizations that make a
profit through a service or sale a product[sic]. This is the largest
top-level domain.
EDU
This domain is for degree-granting educational institutions, such as colleges;
universities; community colleges; libraries; research institutes;
astronomical observatories; (blah blah).
GOV
This domain is for non-military national government organizations, e.g.
Veterans Administration, Department of Energy, national laboaratories such
as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. State governments also fit under
this domain at the second-level, e.g. CA.GOV or HAWAII.GOV. State agencies
should be registered at the third level, e.g. WATER-DEPARTMENT.CA.GOV[...]
MIL
This is the domain for U.S. military organizations. [...]
NET
This is the domain for backbone systems - NICs, NOCs, gateways, etc. Only
machines necessary for the actual operation of the network can be registered
within this domain.
ORG
This is the domain for not-for-profit organizations. Any profit-making
organization does not belong in this domain. It is also for technical-
support groups; professional societies and associations; and computer
users' groups. ORG also exists as a parent to subdomains that do not
clearly fall under the other top-level domains.
US
The US domain is a top-level domain created for people in the US who have
computers at home, or small local corporations who wanted to register their
hosts geographically.
Then again, there used to be a requirement to have OPERATIONAL name servers
when registering a domain, but that seems to have gotten historically
revised away also when $$$ entered the picture. But I digress...
Yeah. I actually talked with someone this AM about that. I think I'm
going to walk the DNS again to look for lame servers. I'll post a summary
here whenever I get around to doing it.
-jamie
/12-line sigfile deleted