“The History of the URL”, Zack Bloom2020-03-05 (algorithms, design)⁠:

[Tracing the history of Internet domain names and WWW URLs from ARPAnet’s need for emails to the present, and explaining how we got our confusing mishmash of Unix-style paths & URIs, and why URLs like google.com. are valid.

With digressions into hacks like Punycode for representing non-English domains and query strings for turning a system for serving HTML documents into a system for arbitrary APIs/RPCs.]