Re: And further down the line - #DissolveTheUnion
"Shouldn't even be .uk - it should be .gb per ISO country code, but I assume it was Jon Postel who agreed with it?"
GB is the ISO 3166 code for the United kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. .gb exists but isn't used apart from some legacy MoD X.400 mail thing I think. The GB ISO code might well be used for stuff outside computer networking. I don't know or care.
.uk is technically an impostor. It's an exception on the ISO list. It prevailed over .gb because .uk had been in wide use in UK academia before the Internet or DNS started to be used. It was common sense to whack that academic name database into the DNS under .uk, so that's what was done.
IIRC Jon Postel delegated both TLDs to Prof Kirstein at UCL who had the only UK node on the Arpanet. .uk eventually ended up with Nominet and JANET holds .gb.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
