BIND - History

History

BIND was written by Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou in the early 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley as a result of a DARPA grant. The acronym BIND is for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, from a technical paper published in 1984.

Versions of BIND through 4.8.3 were maintained by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley.

In the mid-1980s, DEC employees took over BIND development, releasing versions 4.9 and 4.9.1. One of these employees, Paul Vixie, continued to work on BIND after leaving DEC. BIND Version 4.9.2 was sponsored by Vixie Enterprises. He eventually helped start the ISC, which became the entity responsible for BIND versions starting with 4.9.3.

BIND 8 was released by ISC in May 1997.

Version 9 was developed by Nominum, Inc. under an ISC outsourcing contract, and the first version was released October 9, 2000. It was written from scratch in part to address the architectural difficulties with auditing the earlier BIND code bases, and also to support DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions). Other important features of BIND 9 include: TSIG, nsupdate, IPv6, rndc (remote name daemon control), views, multiprocessor support, and an improved portability architecture. rndc uses a shared secret to provide encryption for local and remote terminals during each session. The development of BIND 9 took place under a combination of commercial and military contracts. Most of the features of BIND 9 were funded by UNIX vendors who wanted to ensure that BIND stayed competitive with Microsoft's DNS offerings; the DNSSEC features were funded by the US military, which regarded DNS security as important. BIND 9 was released in September 2000.