The Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced in 1983. It replaced the increasingly unwieldy practice of maintaining a single HOSTS.TXT file that mapped human-readable names to numerical network addresses.
Paul Mockapetris created DNS while working at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. The original specifications were published in November 1983 as RFC 882 and RFC 883, establishing a distributed naming system organized into domains rather than one centrally maintained list.
DNS made addresses easier to remember and allowed the growing network to scale. In 1984, Berkeley students created the first Unix implementation, BIND, which later became one of the most influential DNS server software packages.
A common mix-up is 1984, when BIND appeared, or 1986, when the specifications were updated. Those dates describe later developments; the DNS itself dates to 1983.