HINFO record (thing)

HINFO in this context is short for host information. The original purpose of this DNS record type was to keep track of the different system types on the greater network, so that such information could be integrated and used by various programs and protocols (such as FTP) to do things like data transformation. Unfortunately, not everyone used HINFO as it was intended, and it is now simply used to put human-readable comments into the various DNS hostnames.