I had in my backlog a long post from Cloudflare about the history of URL. It actually contains much more info. So it is a really nice reading:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url
There are many things that I didnt know but these two caught my attention:
The root DNS zone of the internet is composed of thirteen DNS server clusters. There are only 13 server clusters, because that’s all we can fit in a single UDP packet. Historically, DNS has operated through UDP packets, meaning the response to a request can never be more than 512 bytes.
I knew there were 13 root DNS cluster but I didnt think the reason why was the UDP packet size!
And from Punycode, interesting you can create emoji urls!