It was proposed in 1983 and used until the superficially similar Internet Domain Name System was fully adopted.
Structure
The NRS "second-level domains" consisted of UK.AC, UK.CO and UK.MOD. Any organisations not falling into these categories were given their own "second-level" name, e.g. UK.BL or UK.NEL. All NRS names had both a standard and abbreviated form. For example, UK.AC.CAMBRIDGE was the less widely used standard equivalent of the abbreviated name UK.AC.CAM. For email, interoperability between the "Grey Book" email addressing style of user@UK.AC.SITE and ARPA and USENET addresses of the style user@site.ac.uk was achieved by way of mail gateway at University College London.
Comparison with DNS
A principal difference with the Domain Name System was that the order of significance began with the most significant part. Also, NRS names were canonically written in upper case. For example, the University of Cambridge had the NRS name UK.AC.CAM, whereas its DNS domain is cam.ac.uk. After Internet country-code top-level domains were introduced from 1984, confusion was caused when the least significant part of an Internet address matched the most significant part of an NRS address and vice versa. The ccTLD ".cs" for Czechoslovakia came into use around 1990-2 until 1995. The classic joke was that e-mail intended for UK universities ended up in Czechoslovakia, since many JANET e-mail addresses were of the form user@UK.AC.universityname.CS, where "CS" stood for Computer Science. Another significant difference from the DNS was the concept of context to name lookups, e.g. 'mail' or 'file transfer'. This made the NRS more sophisticated than the DNS, permitting overloading of names.
Legacy
JANET transitioned to using Internet protocols in 1991, and by 1994 the DNS had become the de facto standard for domain names on JANET. The final mail gateway was taken out of service by the end of 1997. The one remaining legacy of the NRS is the convention of using.uk for British DNS domains, rather than.gb as specified by ISO 3166.
