[e2e] What if there were no well known numbers?

[Bob Braden]

At 10:39 PM 8/2/2006 -0400, David P. Reed wrote:


>The concept of "well-known ports" was built for a world in which there was 
>no lookup function, no DNS - in fact for a world where people typed 
>addresses in octal, long before there was a naming service (even before 
>the hosts file).


Well, not exactly.  It was (deliberately) built for a world in which we did 
not want increased communication fragility resulting
  from DNS lookup failures.  Maybe that concern no longer seems real, but 
it was the concern.

Bob Braden