DNS makes the Internet easier to navigate

Until the mid-1980s every host on the network was identified through a single master list of names and addresses, maintained centrally and copied out to individual machines, an approach that grew unworkable as the number of connected computers climbed into the thousands. The Domain Name System replaced that flat file with a distributed, hierarchical naming structure, letting different organizations manage their own portion of the namespace while computers still resolved a memorable name into the correct numeric address automatically. That change removed a centralized bottleneck that would otherwise have limited how many networks and machines could practically join, and it is the same hierarchical structure still used to look up every domain name today.