Feinler lead to the invention of the Domain Name System still in use today. In the end, the humble hosts file and innovators like Elizabeth J. edu, Whois, and it became increasingly automated. This system lead to the invention of domains and top level domains like. If you're thinking that someone should have just made a central repository to map all IP addresses with all hostnames, that's exactly what happened.Įarly on, a central hosts file was manually maintained and shared by the Stanford Research Institute. Now everyone on computer B is taken to the correct website whether they visit or And everyone on computer A can only visit, not at least until its own hosts file is updated to match.Īs you can imagine, hosts files would get complicated, fast. When that person does update the hosts file, they add another entry to handle Google with the ġ72.217.175.78 Computer B's newly updated hosts file So everyone on computer B is stuck without Google until someone updates the hosts file. Their hosts files contain this mapping for : 172.217.26.46 Computer A and B's hosts fileīut when Google updates their IP addresses, only computer A updates its hosts file to match: 172.217.175.78 Computer A's updated hosts file Also, each hosts file only worked for the computer it was on, and keeping them in sync with the changes in hostnames and IP addresses became a huge pain.įor example, imagine that you have two computers, A and B. The hosts files system worked well for the early internet, but there were a few major problems.Īs the internet grew, so did the length and complexity of the hosts files. That way, instead of having to remember a long IP address, all you had to do was visit localhost. What's a hosts file anyway?īack in the early days of the internet, before it was widespread, computers used a hosts file to map long, hard to remember IP addresses with much shorter, easier to remember hostnames.įor example, here's a line you'll find in many hosts files on Windows, Linux, and macOs: 127.0.0.1 localhost In this article we'll cover what a hosts file is, how to edit it on Windows, and we'll go over some neat tricks you can do with it. or if you want to set up some helpful shortcuts to internal IP addresses.you want a quick and simple way to block some websites.
But knowing where it is and how it works can be helpful if: In most cases you probably won't need to update your hosts file on Windows. While the internet is only about 30 years old, in many ways the hosts file is a relic of its (not so ancient) past.
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