Joy of Access: Domains

Hosts live in domains. “Domains” are those parts of the net that fall under one organization. Like the industrial world, there was once a time of company towns. Teetot, PWA, and Cerebus, for example, all exist in the domain ACUSD.EDU. That’s the domain of the University of San Diego, my day job. Other companies, such as Qualcomm (QUALCOMM.COM) or General Instrument (GI.COM), have their own domains.

Service domains—cities, rather than company towns—are what you use from home nowadays, however. My service domain is “home.com”, because I get my service through the ISP @HOME. But if you e-mail me, you’ll usually e-mail to an address in the “hoboes.com” domain, because that’s the domain I and some friends have created to give ourselves permanent e-mail addresses. You’re reading this document from a web server in the domain “hoboes.com”.