It's more like the old JANET domain names, that looked like UK.AC.MAN.CS.R5.
Ah yes, I remember those (dimly!)... though if you were sending mail to them it was still `user@` at the start. I don't remember when JANET reversed their ordering to match everyone else's - mid-nineties, maybe?
What we have now is obviously much friendlier to the end user, given it has no reliance on remembering or understanding the network topology!