20 Modern Systems Still Running on Old Tech

Type a familiar website name into a browser, and there is no need to memorize a long sequence of numbers. That convenience depends on a system whose first official specifications arrived in 1983. The Domain Name System translates human-friendly names into the information computers need to locate services, and the IETF says today’s global DNS handles more than a million queries every second. It has hardly remained frozen since the Reagan era. Security extensions, internationalized names, encrypted DNS transports, and decades of operational improvements have accumulated around the original framework.