As Internet uses, we are accustomed to navigating between websites using their unique address names, known as domain names or URLs (although technically URL actually refers to what follows after the domain name). In fact, however, computers communicate with one another exclusively through another unique address system, a series of numbers called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. The massive database which links easily remembered URL names to the meaningful index of IP addresses is called the Domain Name System (DNS), and has been the basis for a usable Internet since it was devised in the early 1980s.
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