Elizabeth J. Feinler - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_J.

_Feinler

Elizabeth J. Feinler
Elizabeth Jocelyn "Jake" Feinler (born March 2, 1931) is an American information scientist. From 1972
until 1989 she was director of the Network Information Systems Center at the Stanford Research Institute
Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler
(SRI International). Her group operated the Network Information Center (NIC) for the ARPANET as it
evolved into the Defense Data Network (DDN) and the Internet.[2]

Contents
Early life and education
Career
Early career
ARPANET and NIC
Later career
Nickname
References
External links
Jake Feinler, c.2011
Born Elizabeth Jocelyn
Early life and education Feinler
March 2, 1931[1]
Feinler was born on March 2, 1931 in Wheeling, West Virginia, where she also grew up.[1][2] She received an Wheeling, West
undergraduate degree from West Liberty State College, the first from her family to attend college. Virginia
Nationality American
Career Alma mater West Liberty State
College and Purdue
Early career University

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She was working toward a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Purdue University when she decided to earn some Known for Running the original
money by working for a year or two before starting on her thesis. Working at the Chemical Abstracts Service ARPANET NIC at SRI
in Columbus, Ohio, she served as an assistant editor on a huge project to index the world's chemical
Scientific career
compounds. There she became intrigued with the challenges of creating such large data compilations and
never returned to biochemistry. Instead, in 1960, she relocated to California and joined the Information Fields Computer science
Research Department at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) where she worked to Institutions SRI, NASA Ames,
develop the Handbook of Psychopharmacology and the Chemical Process Economics Handbook.[3] Computer History
Museum
ARPANET and NIC Influences Doug Engelbart

Feinler was leading the Literature Research section of SRI's library when, in 1972, Doug Engelbart recruited her to join his Augmentation
Research Center (ARC), which was sponsored by the Information Processing Techniques Office of the US Advanced Research Project Agency
(DARPA). Her first task was to write a Resource Handbook for the first demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer
Communication Conference. By 1974 she was the principal investigator to help plan and run the new Network Information Center (NIC) for the
ARPANET.[4][5]

The NIC provided reference service to users (initially over the phone and by physical mail), maintained and published a directory of people (the
"white pages"), a resource handbook (the "yellow pages", a list of services) and the protocol handbook. After the Network Operations Center at
Bolt, Beranek and Newman brought new hosts onto the network, the NIC registered names, provided access control for terminals, audit trail and
billing information, and distributed Request for Comments (RFCs).[6] Feinler, working with Steve Crocker, Jon Postel, Joyce Reynolds and other
members of the Network Working Group (NWG), developed RFCs into the official set of technical notes for the ARPANET and later the Internet.
The NIC provided the first links to on-line documents using the NLS Journal system developed at ARC.[4] Engelbart continued leading-edge
research in the ARC, while the NIC provided a service to all network users. This led to establishing the NIC as a separate project with Feinler as
manager.[7]

The NWG and Feinler's team defined a simple text file format for host names in 1974,[8] and revised the format several times as the networks
evolved.[9][10] The host table itself was continuously updated on almost a daily basis. In 1975, the Defense Communication Agency (DCA) took
operational control and support, and over time split the ARPANET into research and military networks. DCA used the name Defense Data
Network to refer to the combination, and the NIC served as its information center. When e-mail and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) became
available around 1976, the NIC used them to deliver information to users via the network.[4] In 1977, Postel moved to the Information Sciences
Institute, and the RFC editor and number assignment functions moved with him, while the NIC stayed at SRI. By 1979, Feinler and her group
were working on ways to scale up the name service.[11] In 1982, an Internet protocol was defined by Ken Harrenstien and Vic White in her group
to access the online directory of people, called Whois.[12] As the Internet expanded, the Domain Name System was designed to handle the growth
by delegating naming authority to distributed name servers. Her group became the overall naming authority of the Internet, developing and
managing the name registries of the top-level domains of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, and .com.[13] Even the names of the top-level domains,

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based on generic categories such as .com were suggestions of the NIC team, approved by the Internet developer community.

Later career

After Feinler left SRI, in 1989, she worked as a network requirements manager and helped develop guidelines for managing the NASA Science
Internet (NSI) NIC at the NASA Ames Research Center. Feinler donated an extensive collection of early Internet papers to the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View, California and after she retired from NASA in 1996 worked as a volunteer at the museum to organize the material.[3]
She published a history of the NIC in 2010.[14] In 2012, Feinler was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.[15] In July,
2013 she received[16] the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award "for her contributions to the early development and administration of the Internet
through her leadership of the Network Information Center (NIC) for the ARPANET".

Nickname
Feinler explains how she got her nickname, "Jake":

When I was born, double names were popular. My real name is Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler, and my family was going to call me Betty Jo
to match my sister’s name, Mary Lou. Only two at the time, my sister’s version of Betty Jo sounded like Baby Jake. I always say,
Thank goodness they dropped the "Baby".[3]

References
1. Interviewed by Janet Abbate (July 8, 2002). "Oral-History:Elizabeth
"Jake" Feinler" (http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:
Elizabeth_%22Jake%22_Feinler) . Interview # 597. IEEE History
Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Retrieved 2012-09-01.
2. Weber, Marc (10 September 2009). "Feinler, Elizabeth oral history"
(http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702199) .
Oral histories online. Mountain View, CA: Computer History
Museum. X5378.2009. Retrieved September 29, 2013.
3. Eleanor Dickman (May 2001). "Internet History Buff: Jake Feinler"
(https://web.archive.org/web/20121001061700/http://www.computer
history.org/core/backissues/pdf/core_2_2.pdf) (PDF). Focus on
People section in CORE 2.2. Computer Museum History Center,
Moffett Field, California. p. 14. Archived from the original (http://ww
w.computerhistory.org/core/backissues/pdf/core_2_2.pdf) (PDF)
on October 1, 2012. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
4. "Elizabeth J. Feinler" (https://archive.sri.com/about/alumni/alumni-h
all-fame-2000#Feinler) . SRI Alumni Hall of Fame. 2000.
Retrieved 2020-02-17.

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5. "Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler" (http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/galle
ry/photos/w11.html) . Stanford MouseSite. Stanford University.
Retrieved 2012-07-29.
6. Crocker, Steve (April 1969). Documentation Conventions (https://to
ols.ietf.org/html/rfc3) . IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC0003 (https://doi.or
g/10.17487%2FRFC0003) . RFC 3 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3)
. Management and Computer Networks.
7. Thierry Bardini; Michael Friedewald (2002). Chronicle of the Death
of a Laboratory: Douglas Engelbart and the Failure of the
Knowledge Workshop (http://www.friedewald-family.de/Publikatione
n/HoT2002.pdf) (PDF). History of Technology. 23. pp. 192–212.
ISBN 978-0-8264-5616-8.
8. Kudlick, M.D. (January 10, 1974). Host names on-line (https://tools.
ietf.org/html/rfc608) . IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC0608 (https://doi.org
/10.17487%2FRFC0608) . RFC 608 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6
08) .
9. Feinler, Elizabeth; Harrenstien, Ken; Su, Zaw-Sing; White, Vic (1
March 1982). DoD Internet Host Table Specification (https://tools.iet
f.org/html/rfc810) . IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC0810 (https://doi.org/1
0.17487%2FRFC0810) . RFC 810 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc81
0) .
10. Harrenstien, K.; Stahl, M.; Feinler, E. (October 1985). DoD Internet
Host Table Specification (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc952) . IETF.
doi:10.17487/RFC0952 (https://doi.org/10.17487%2FRFC0952) .
RFC 952 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc952) .
11. Pickens, John R.; Feinler, Elizabeth J.; Mathis, James E. (July
1979). The NIC Name Server—A Datagram Based Information
Utility (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc756) . IETF.
doi:10.17487/RFC0756 (https://doi.org/10.17487%2FRFC0756) .
RFC 756 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc756) . Also published in the
proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Conference on Distributed Data
12. Harrenstien, Ken; White, Vic (1 March 1982). NICNAME/WHOIS (ht
tps://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc812) . IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC0812 (htt
ps://doi.org/10.17487%2FRFC0812) . RFC 812 (https://tools.ietf.o
rg/html/rfc812) .
13. Postel, J.; Reynolds, J. (October 1984). Domain Requirements (htt
ps://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920) . IETF. doi:10.17487/RFC0920 (http
s://doi.org/10.17487%2FRFC0920) . RFC 920 (https://tools.ietf.or
g/html/rfc920) .
14. Elizabeth Feinler (July–September 2010). "The Network
Information Center and its Archives". Annals of the History of
Computing. 32 (3): 83–89. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2010.54 (https://doi.
org/10.1109%2FMAHC.2010.54) .
15. 2012 Inductees (http://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/year/2
012) , Internet Hall of Fame website. Last accessed April 24,
2012
16. "Elizabeth Feinler Receives 2013 Jonathan B. Postel Service
Award - Internet Society" (http://www.internetsociety.org/Elizabeth-
Feinler-2013-Postel-Award) . internetsociety.org.

External links
Elizabeth Feinler's bibliography (https://web.archive.org/web/20121003192524/http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/f/Feinl
er:Elizabeth.html) from dblp: Computer Science Bibliography
"Internet History 1969" (http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/) , web pages, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA, USA
"Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler photos" (http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/gallery/photos/w11.html) , MouseSite Photo Gallery, Science and
Technology in the Making (STIM) web site, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
Frode Hegland and Fleur Klijnsma. "Jake Feinler" (http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/video-jake.html) . Invisible Revolution Web

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Elizabeth J. Feinler - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_J._Feinler

documentary. London. Retrieved April 13, 2011. Video of interview.

Elizabeth Feinler and Jon Postel, editors (January 1978). "ARPANET Protocol Handbook" (https://web.archive.org/web/20121001061727/htt
p://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102659862) . NIC 7104. Network Information Center (NIC), SRI International. Archived
from the original (http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102659862) on October 1, 2012. Retrieved April 13, 2011.

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