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Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler

Summary

Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler (born March 2, 1931) is an American information scientist who led the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International, the ARPANET's directory and registry office, from the early 1970s until 1989. Her group kept the network's host name registry, built the WHOIS directory server and proposed the generic top-level domains that became .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org and .net. She was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Web Building Encyclopedia · People · Last reviewed October 22, 2026 · 11 min read

Who Elizabeth Feinler is

Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler, known to nearly everyone as Jake, is an American information scientist. She was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on March 2, 1931.1

From the early 1970s to 1989 she led the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. The NIC was the information office of the ARPANET, the US defense research network that grew into the internet, and later of the Defense Data Network (DDN), the military network the ARPANET became part of.23

Her group kept the registry of host names from 1972 to 1989, built the first query-based directory server for names and addresses, called WHOIS, and developed the top-level domain scheme of .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org and .net.24 A host is any computer attached to the network, and a top-level domain is the last part of a name, such as the “com” in example.com.

SRI managed the NIC from 1970 until 1991, and Feinler led it for most of that time.3 The Internet Hall of Fame inducted her in 2012.2

From chemistry to SRI

Feinler was the first person in her family to go to college.1 She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at West Liberty State College, now West Liberty University, in 1954, and then did graduate work in biochemistry at Purdue University.56 Sources differ on how that study ended: West Liberty’s alumni page says she earned a master’s degree at Purdue, while in a 2002 interview she said she finished her coursework and left because she ran out of money.61

In 1958 she joined Chemical Abstracts Service in Columbus, Ohio, as an assistant editor for its Fifth Decennial Index.5 She later called that index “one of the biggest information projects in the world.”1

She moved to SRI, then the Stanford Research Institute, in 1960 as an information scientist, heading its Information Research Department.5 In 1972 she joined Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at SRI.5 ARC ran the second computer on the ARPANET, and the NIC was first housed there.7

Engelbart brought her in to produce a resource handbook for the new network. In her own telling, she had no idea at the time what that was.1 She arrived as ARC was preparing to demonstrate the NIC at the International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC) in Washington in 1972, an event she described as the internet’s first show-and-tell.1

Running the Network Information Center

SRI started gathering network documents in 1967 for a proposal to run an information center, and its NIC became the first one on the ARPANET in 1970.8 According to the guide to the NIC’s archives, which Feinler wrote, the NIC became a separate project in 1973 with her as principal investigator, and from 1974 it was paid for under contracts with the Defense Communications Agency (DCA).8

Sources give slightly different dates for her years in charge:

  • Her Internet Hall of Fame biography says she was principal investigator from 1974 and director of SRI’s Network Information Systems Center from 1985 until she retired in 1989.5
  • The Internet Society says she ran the NIC from 1974 to 1989.4
  • The Computer History Museum says she was principal investigator for the Defense Data Network project from 1973 to 1991.7
  • In her own 1999 account in RFC 2555, she wrote that she became principal investigator for the NIC project in 1972.9

Operational management of the ARPANET passed to the DCA in July 1975, and the DCA also funded the NIC.10 By 1983 the NIC served every part of the Defense Data Network.8

The NIC’s best-known publications were two reference books: the ARPANET (later DDN) Directory of people, which the archive guide calls the “white pages,” and the Resource Handbook of sites and services, the “yellow pages.”8 When she began the handbook, Feinler recalled, there were about 30 sites on the network, and she estimated that the NIC was mailing out about 80,000 documents a year in the early period.1

The NIC also distributed the Request for Comments (RFC) documents in which network protocols were written down. Feinler wrote in 1999 that by 1972 the NIC was sending a set of “functional documents,” including the Protocol Handbook, to the Technical Liaison at each site. Once email and file transfer worked, a user could ask for an RFC by email and have it delivered automatically to their mailbox.9 In that same account she called Jon Postel, who had the office next to hers at SRI until 1976, “Mister RFC.”9

Her group’s other work included user registration for terminal access, parts of the first audit trail and billing system for the network, and PCSam, a program that fetched email from a server and downloaded it to a personal computer.5

The host table and host naming

Before the Domain Name System, every computer on the network learned the names and addresses of all the others from one list, the host table. From 1971 the NIC kept that table for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.83

Naming a new host was a small administrative routine. BBN, the company that built the network’s switching computers, assigned the port, and the site said what name it wanted. The NIC checked that the name was not taken and met the network’s guidelines, and asked each host to name a Technical Liaison, the contact for problems and maintenance. That process led to the NIC being named the official host name registry for the ARPANET.10

The table moved online in 1974. RFC 608, dated January 10, 1974, and written by M. D. Kudlick of SRI, agreed to a proposal from Peter Deutsch that the NIC keep an online text file of host names, addresses and attributes, called HOSTS.TXT. A program would regenerate it weekly or as needed, and sites would fetch it by FTP, the file transfer protocol.11

Feinler co-wrote the later specifications:

  • RFC 810, dated March 1, 1982, by Feinler, Ken Harrenstien, Zaw-Sing Su and Vic White of the NIC, defined a new host table format for both the ARPANET and the wider internet.12
  • RFC 952, from October 1985, by Harrenstien, Mary Stahl and Feinler, said anyone could fetch NETINFO:HOSTS.TXT from the SRI-NIC computer by anonymous FTP. Host names could be up to 24 characters of letters, digits, hyphens and periods, had to start with a letter and could not contain spaces. Domain and network registrations went to the NIC at [email protected].13

The NIC also built servers that answered questions about the table so that small computers did not need to keep all of it. RFC 756, from July 1979, by John Pickens, Feinler and James Mathis, described the NIC Name Server, which answered single-message queries with host addresses. It was meant for hosts with little memory and for mobile packet radio terminals.14 RFC 953, from October 1985, described the Hostname Server on TCP port 101, which delivered the table’s data in a form programs could read.15

A single list could not keep up with a growing network. Feinler recalled that the file “kept getting bigger and bigger, and finally it wouldn’t fit into the space on the machine.”1 In her 2010 paper she adds that it grew until host addresses neared the space set aside for them in packet headers and small hosts could no longer store it.10

The fix was the distributed Domain Name System, designed by Paul Mockapetris at USC’s Information Sciences Institute. The move from the flat host table to DNS ran from 1983 through 1988.810 Jon Postel’s revised schedule of October 1984, RFC 921, planned a master table of top-level domains at the NIC by December 15, 1984, new domain registrations from January 15, 1985, and an end, after September 15, 1985, to the need for the NIC’s master host table to be complete for the DARPA research community.16 During the changeover the NIC kept both the old and the new tables.10

WHOIS: the network’s white pages

WHOIS began as the NIC’s online people directory. A user typed “whois” and a last name and got back a person’s name, address, telephone number and email address.18 It replaced an earlier NIC system called Identfile.8

The first specification, RFC 812, is dated March 1, 1982, and was written by Ken Harrenstien and Vic White of the NIC. It describes the NICNAME/WHOIS server running on the SRI-NIC machine on port 43.17

RFC 954, the October 1985 update by Harrenstien, Stahl and Feinler, says the DCA asked that every person with a directory on an ARPANET or MILNET host be registered in the NIC’s WHOIS database. The server could also look up organizations, hosts and the telephone numbers of terminal access computers (TACs). Its answers were written for people, “not currently intended to be machine-readable.”18

The protocol outlived the NIC. RFC 3912, published in September 2004, replaced RFC 954 without changing how the protocol works on the network, and still runs it on TCP port 43. Its acknowledgments say that Harrenstien, Stahl and Feinler wrote the original standard.19

ICANN has since begun sunsetting WHOIS for generic top-level domains such as .com. As of January 28, 2025, ICANN made the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) the definitive source of registration data for generic top-level domains.20 The domain name entry covers that change and the privacy rules around it.

Choosing .com, .edu and the other categories

The move to domain names raised a question the host table never had to answer: what should the top level of the tree be? In her 2010 paper, Feinler recounts that DARPA and the DCA jointly decided to add “.arpa” to host names as a test domain, and that many sites objected. The DCA leaned toward making the DDN itself a top-level domain and renaming hosts with “.mil.”10

Feinler argued that real organizations should not be top-level domains. On October 6, 1982, she sent an email to Thomas (Tom) Harris, technical lead at the DCA’s program management office, proposing that the top-level domains be generic categories instead, with .mil as one of them alongside .edu, .gov, .org and .com. Harris agreed.10

The reasoning was about who would run each branch. With generic categories, each community could later hand its part of the tree to its own body. Her paper gives examples: the National Science Foundation or EDUCOM for .edu, the National Bureau of Standards for .gov and the American National Standards Institute for .com.10

She gave the list to Postel at a meeting at SRI in late 1982. It was discussed on the Namedroppers mailing list and published in RFC 920.10 RFC 920, written by Postel and Joyce Reynolds of ISI and published in October 1984, named the first top-level domains: ARPA (temporary), GOV, EDU, COM, MIL and ORG, plus two-letter country codes.21 Its acknowledgment thanks “especially the staff of the Network Information Center, particularly J. Feinler and K. Harrenstien.”21

The same RFC made the NIC the registrar for all top-level domains and the administrator of the ones in use, while saying it was not intended that the NIC run them all forever.21 It stated the purpose of domains as splitting up name management that a central office had done until then.21

The name .com came late. Business was an afterthought category, and Feinler preferred “.bus,” but that clashed with existing hardware names. Ken Harrenstien, the NIC’s software architect, remembers changing .bus to .com while he built the NIC’s DNS server.10 Credit is therefore told in different ways: West Liberty University’s alumni page says she is credited with coining “dot com,” and in her 2002 interview she agreed that the naming scheme was her idea, while her own paper gives the final .com label to Harrenstien.6110

The .net category was added later, after more discussion on Namedroppers.10 By November 1987, Mary Stahl’s Domain Administrators Guide, RFC 1032, listed ARPA, COM, EDU, GOV, MIL, NET and ORG, plus country codes. It told anyone who wanted a second-level domain to email a questionnaire to [email protected], provide at least two independent name servers and name both an administrative and a technical contact. Names were assigned first come, first served.22

After SRI

Feinler retired from SRI in 1989.5 The NIC stayed at SRI, still acting as naming authority, until its contract was competed in 1991 and awarded to three other contractors.1023 RFC 1261, written by Scott Williamson and Leslie Nobile of Network Solutions, announced that the NIC would move from SRI to Government Systems Inc. (GSI) in Chantilly, Virginia, with the transition officially scheduled for October 1, 1991. The services moving included network and user registration, among them network number and top-level domain name assignment. The WHOIS database was frozen from September 26 to 30, 1991, for the handover.23 The archive guide gives 1991 for the end of the project in most places but 1992 in its administrative history.8

She then worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, as a network requirements manager for the contractor Sterling Software.5 In her 2002 interview she described first taking a couple of years off, then spending about five years at Ames on projects including the NASA Science Internet.1

She kept the NIC’s paper trail. The Computer History Museum received the SRI ARC and NIC records from her in 2001: 281 boxes, or 351 linear feet, covering roughly 1959 to 2006. With staff and volunteers she processed the collection and wrote its finding aid in 2011.8 The museum calls these archives a “cornerstone” of its networking collection.7

Her other roles included being a founding member of the Internet Engineering Task Force and chair of IFIP Working Group 6.5 on user requirements for electronic mail.5 Her honors include:

  • SRI Alumni Hall of Fame, 2000.5
  • West Liberty University Alumni Wall of Honor, 2001.6
  • Internet Hall of Fame, 2012.2
  • The Internet Society’s Jonathan B. Postel Service Award, presented during the 87th IETF meeting in Berlin, which ran from July 28 to August 2, 2013.4

Timeline

  1. Feinler receives the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award at IETF 87 in Berlin4
  2. Feinler is inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame2
  3. The Computer History Museum receives the SRI ARC and NIC records from Feinler8
  4. RFC 1261's scheduled date for the NIC's move from SRI to Government Systems Inc.23
  5. Feinler retires from SRI5
  6. RFC 1032, the NIC's Domain Administrators Guide, lists .net among the top-level domains22
  7. RFC 952, RFC 953 and RFC 954 by Harrenstien, Stahl and Feinler update the host table, Hostname Server and WHOIS18
  8. RFC 920 names the first top-level domains and thanks Feinler and Harrenstien21
  9. Feinler emails the DCA proposing generic top-level domain categories10
  10. RFC 812 specifies NICNAME/WHOIS and RFC 810 a new host table format17
  11. RFC 756 describes the NIC Name Server14
  12. RFC 608 puts the NIC's host table online as HOSTS.TXT11
  13. Feinler joins Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI5
  14. Feinler joins SRI as an information scientist5
  15. Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler is born in Wheeling, West Virginia1

What it means for your website

Feinler’s work sits behind two things every site owner deals with: the extension on your domain and the public record of who registered it.

  • Your extension is one of her categories, or a descendant of them. RFC 920 listed COM as the domain for commercial organizations, EDU for education, GOV for government and ORG for other organizations.21 Today there are many more choices; our guide to domain extensions explains them, and domains 101 covers the basics.
  • Look up your own record. The WHOIS directory her group ran has given way to RDAP for generic top-level domains, and ICANN points people to its RDAP-based Lookup service.20 Search for your domain to see which registrar holds it and when it expires.
  • Keep your contact details current. ICANN says registrants must give accurate information for directories such as WHOIS, update it promptly when it changes, and answer their registrar within 15 days.24 If your web designer registered the domain, make sure you are listed as the registrant.
  • Check you have two name servers. In 1987 the NIC already required at least two independent name servers for every domain.22 Your registrar’s settings should list two or more; the DNS entry explains what they do.
  • Short names are an old rule of thumb. The NIC advised keeping domain names to 12 characters or fewer.22 A short name is still easier to type, say and fit on a business card.

See also

References

  1. Oral-History: Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler (interview by Janet Abbate). IEEE History Center, Engineering and Technology History Wiki. 2002-07. accessed October 22, 2026.
  2. Elizabeth Feinler. Internet Hall of Fame. accessed October 22, 2026.
  3. Domain names and the Network Information Center. SRI International. accessed October 22, 2026.
  4. Elizabeth Feinler Receives 2013 Jonathan B. Postel Service Award. Internet Society. 2013-07-31. accessed October 22, 2026.
  5. Official Biography: Elizabeth Feinler. Internet Hall of Fame. accessed October 22, 2026.
  6. Elizabeth J. Feinler. Alumni Wall of Honor, West Liberty University. accessed October 22, 2026.
  7. Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler. Computer History Museum. accessed October 22, 2026.
  8. Guide to the SRI ARC/NIC records, Collection X3578.2006. Elizabeth Feinler, Computer History Museum. 2011. accessed October 22, 2026.
  9. RFC 2555: 30 Years of RFCs. RFC Editor. 1999-04. accessed October 22, 2026.
  10. Host Tables, Top Level Domain Names and the Origin of Dot Com. Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler, paper hosted by Stephane Bortzmeyer. 2010-03-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
  11. RFC 608: Host Names On-Line. M. D. Kudlick, SRI-ARC, RFC Editor. 1974-01-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  12. RFC 810: DoD Internet Host Table Specification. E. Feinler, K. Harrenstien, Z. Su and V. White, SRI International, RFC Editor. 1982-03-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
  13. RFC 952: DoD Internet Host Table Specification. K. Harrenstien, M. Stahl and E. Feinler, SRI, RFC Editor. 1985-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  14. RFC 756: The NIC Name Server, A Datagram Based Information Utility. J. R. Pickens, E. J. Feinler and J. E. Mathis, SRI International, RFC Editor. 1979-07. accessed October 22, 2026.
  15. RFC 953: Hostname Server. K. Harrenstien, M. Stahl and E. Feinler, SRI, RFC Editor. 1985-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  16. RFC 921: Domain Name System Implementation Schedule, Revised. J. Postel, USC Information Sciences Institute, RFC Editor. 1984-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  17. RFC 812: NICNAME/WHOIS. K. Harrenstien and V. White, SRI International, RFC Editor. 1982-03-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
  18. RFC 954: NICNAME/WHOIS. K. Harrenstien, M. Stahl and E. Feinler, SRI, RFC Editor. 1985-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  19. RFC 3912: WHOIS Protocol Specification. L. Daigle, VeriSign, RFC Editor. 2004-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  20. ICANN Update: Launching RDAP; Sunsetting WHOIS. ICANN. 2025-01-27. accessed October 22, 2026.
  21. RFC 920: Domain Requirements. J. Postel and J. Reynolds, USC Information Sciences Institute, RFC Editor. 1984-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  22. RFC 1032: Domain Administrators Guide. M. Stahl, SRI International, RFC Editor. 1987-11. accessed October 22, 2026.
  23. RFC 1261: Transition of NIC Services. S. Williamson and L. Nobile, Network Solutions, RFC Editor. 1991-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  24. Registrants' Benefits and Responsibilities. ICANN. accessed October 22, 2026.

Web Building Encyclopedia. First published October 22, 2026. Last reviewed October 22, 2026. Every fact on this page is linked to a source we opened. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].