Root servers have played a crucial role in the development of the Internet. They are essential for maintaining the Internet’s orderly, stable, and secure expansion. The “birth” of these servers occurred toward the end of the 20th century, during a period when the world was laying the groundwork for digital communication.
In the late 1960s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, the ARPANET project – the prototype of today’s Internet – was launched. As ARPANET evolved, it introduced new demands: communication between computers needed to become faster, more efficient, stable, and secure.
In the early days of the Internet, domain name resolution relied on a manually maintained HOSTS.TXT file. As the network grew, this method became increasingly unstable and inefficient. To address these limitations, Paul Mockapetris of the USC Information Sciences Institute introduced a new hierarchical system in 1983: the Domain Name System (DNS).
At the top of this structure were the Root Servers, designed to provide centralized control over name resolution. From the moment they became operational in 1984-1985, Root Servers assumed the critical role of overseeing and directing the process of translating domain names into IP addresses – effectively becoming the backbone of Internet navigation.
Root Servers do not store the IP addresses of domain names themselves, but they know where to find them. When a user searches for a domain – such as isoc.am, amnic.net, or any other website – the Root Server receives the request and directs it to the appropriate Top-Level Domain (TLD) name servers. In these examples, the request would be routed to the servers responsible for the .am and .net TLDs, which then continue the resolution process.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) was originally responsible for managing the Domain Name System, under the leadership of renowned engineer John Postel. For many years, Postel manually oversaw the name resolution process and coordinated the operation of the Root Servers.
In 1998, these responsibilities were transferred to the newly established Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Since then, and thanks to ongoing technological advancements, a global network of Root Servers has been operating reliably for decades, forming a vital part of the Internet’s infrastructure.
