Elizabeth Feinler
lorenetworkingops culture
The information scientist who ran the Network Information Center from 1972 to 1989 - the Host Naming Registry for the whole internet - and whose group devised the .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org and .net scheme and built the first WHOIS server.
Before DNS, every machine on the network was listed in one file that her group maintained and published, updated almost daily by hand. That is the fact worth sitting with: the internet's entire naming authority was a directory service run by a team at SRI, reachable by telephone and post as well as by network. She joined Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center in 1972 and stayed until the year the registry became too big for a file. She called the NIC the prehistoric Google of its day, and in retirement she organised over 350 boxes of the Engelbart and NIC archives so the record would survive.
Also known as: jake feinler, nic, network information center
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame, official biography of Elizabeth Feinler: her group ran the Host Naming Registry from 1972 to 1989, built the first WHOIS server, and devised the .com .edu .gov .mil .org .net scheme
- ICANN - Elizabeth 'Jake' Feinler, the woman behind WHOIS, introduced by Steve Crocker
- Elizabeth J. Feinler: director of the Network Information Systems Center at SRI from 1972 to 1989, working with Crocker, Postel and Reynolds on the RFC series