once upon a time there was a single file: HOSTS.TXT, maintained by SRI's (Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park) Network Information Center.

then came tcp/ip, an explosion and

'... a host of problems with HOSTS.TXT': Traffic and load, Name collisions, Consistency. The essential problem was that the HOSTS.TXT mechanism didn't scale well. Ironically, the success of the ARPAnet as an experiment led to the failure and obsolescence of HOSTS.TXT.

Paul Mockapetris, then of USC's Information Sciences Institute, was responsible for designing the architecture of the new system. In 1984, he released RFCs 882 and 883, which describe the Domain Name System. These RFCs were superseded by RFCs 1034 and 1035, the current specifications of the Domain Name System.[2] RFCs 1034 and 1035 have now been augmented by many other RFCs, which describe potential DNS security problems, implementation problems, administrative gotchas, mechanisms for dynamically upd.' (dns&bind)

paul mockapetris wrote the first implementation of the dns, called jeeves. later came bind by kevin j. dunlap.

dns glossary from men and mice.
isc, internet software consortium