Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler: The Woman Behind WHOISSteve Crocker

Last fall, I had the distinct honor of introducing my erstwhile colleague Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler as she was inducted as a Fellow at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. In this blog, I would like to introduce Jake and her work to the ICANN community.

Jake joined the Literature Research Division at SRI International, formerly the Stanford Research Institute, in 1960, after a stint indexing chemical compounds at Chemical Abstracts Service. Recognizing her talent in organizing large amounts of complex data, Doug Engelbart recruited her to join his Augmentation Research Center. Jake's first assignment was to develop the Resource Handbook for the first demonstration of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) at the International Computer Communication Conference. By 1974, she was the principal investigator of the new Network Information Center (NIC) for ARPANET.

The users of ARPANET in those days were primarily students and staff, including Charley Kline, Jon Postel, Vint Cerf, and me, at the University of California, Los Angeles. There were similar contributors at SRI, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

Over the next several years, Jake had a key role in organizing the contact information and curating and distributing reference materials across the burgeoning net. Jake's group provided reference services to users by mail and phone, and maintained a directory of people, a resource handbook, and a protocol handbook. The project entailed recording two contacts at each computer node site, a technical contact and an administrative contact. Her compilation efforts became the core of what the Internet users around the world refer to as WHOIS. More than 50 years later, Jake's seminal work continues to be a core part of the Internet's infrastructure.

The NIC would go on to provide services such as the registration of domain names, which led to Jake running the first Internet Naming Authority, the precursor to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. In that role, she oversaw the transition from numerical addresses to the Domain Name System. It was Jake's team who helped select the first top-level domains - .com, .org, .net, etc.

Jake is recognized not only as an Internet pioneer and advocate for women in technology but also a champion of inclusivity. In recognition of Jake's contributions, ICANN launched a video series titled "Internet Pioneers: Stories from the Network's Early Builders," the first of which was released in recognition of International Women's Day just prior to ICANN82.

A long-form historical video and two short companion videos provide deeper insights into Jake's journey through conversations with her colleagues. Filmed on location at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, these videos capture the significance of Jake's contributions.