Jake Feinler

Former manager at the Network Information Center, Stanford Research Institute

• Born: March 2, 1931
• Place of Birth: Wheeling, West Virginia

Primary Company/Organization: Stanford Research Institute

Introduction

Jake Feinler is an Internet and information scientist who worked at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where she managed the Network Information Center (NIC) for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and then the Defense Data Nework (DDN), which were the first packet-switching networks that allowed scientists to share resources among universities. Over time, this system evolved into the Internet. Feinler's group was also responsible for the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). From 1989 to 1996, Feinler worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center. In 2010, she published a history of the NIC. Feinler was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame as an Internet “pioneer” in 2012.

Early Life

Elizabeth Jocelyn “Jake” Feinler was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on March 2, 1931. Her stepfather worked at a steel mill and her mother was a homemaker. She had a sister and a half brother. At first interested in art, she attended college in Cincinnati on an advertising design scholarship; there she planned to work for a semester at an advertising firm. However, impatient that this was not allowed in her freshman year, she transferred to West Liberty State College in West Virginia, where she became interested in chemistry. She was the first person in her family to attend college.

Life's Work

Feinler finished course work toward a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. As a graduate student short of money, Feinler took off a year in 1957 and worked for Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) in Columbus, Ohio. While at CAS, Feinler discovered her interest in and aptitude for manipulating data and compiling data research. CAS was then compiling the Fifth Decennial Index, an index of the world's chemical compounds developed during the past hundred years. It was one of the biggest information projects in the world at the time. Feinler served as its assistant editor.

Feinler grew up in the mid-twentieth century, a time of scientific advancement (Sputnik, the Russian satellite, was launched in 1957). Feinler became interested in science when there were not many women in scientific fields, let alone information technology. Feinler heard about Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California (now SRI International) at Columbus meetings of the American Chemical Society. In 1960, she contacted SRI about a job. She had just made plans to tour Europe for a month with a friend when SRI hired her. After a month abroad, Feinler returned to the United States and moved to Menlo Park, an affluent region in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she settled in 1966.

In 1972, Feinler worked in the Literature Research section of the Information Resource Center (IRC) of what was then SRI's library. There she created the Handbook of Psychopharmacology and the Chemical Process Economics Handbook. That year, Douglas Engelbart—the innovative networking pioneer and inventor of the multiuser oN-Line System (NLS) and graphical user interface (GUI) devices such as the computer mouse—recruited her to join his Augmentation Research Center (ARC). ARC was sponsored by the Office of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (originally ARPA).

Engelbart's team was busy working on ARPA's cutting-edge ARPANET, a packet-switching experiment. This experiment created the first computer-to-computer transmission of text messages for ARPANET when it successfully communicated with a computer at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Engelbart chose Feinler to compose the much-needed Resource Handbook for the Internet to accompany the ARPANET at the 1972 International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC) in Washington, D.C. Engelbart thought Feinler best qualified for the job, although neither was clear what such a handbook entailed. The group successfully demonstrated the ARPANET at the conference.

In 1974, Feinler became principal investigator at SRI's Network Information Center (NIC). In an interview describing her time working with Engelbart, Feinler compared herself—dressed professionally in a skirt and blouse—to Engelbart's group, which she described as a group of Birkenstock-wearing, long-haired students she had first observed rolling a strange device around on a desk with their eyes glued to a television screen; the device turned out to be a groundbreaking input device now known as the computer mouse.

Feinler and Engelbart worked together for years. Feinler's NIC team provided user services, whereas Engelbart's ARC team conducted the research. These user services included identifying the first links to online documents using ARC's NLS system; making available reference services to network users via telephone and physical mail; maintaining a “white pages” directory of interested or involved personnel; maintaining a resource handbook (a “yellow pages” listing all available services); and providing a protocol handbook.

In 1975, the Defense Communication Agency (DCA) took over and split the ARPANET into research and military networks. The DCA used the name Defense Data Network (DDN) for the military portion. Feinler and the NIC stayed as part of SRI.

In 1978, Feinler worked with Stephen Crocker, Jon Postel, and Joyce Reynolds of the Network Working Group (NWG) to establish a technical manual for the ARPANET. As the network grew, NIC registered names, allowed access control across terminals, provided billing and audit information, and initiated a number of requests for comments (RFCs). In 1974, Feinler's team had installed a simple text format for names of servers that they revised several times. The Domain Name System was then implemented to assign authority and names to such servers, and by 1979 Feinler's team was responsible for developing and assigning the now familiar top-level domain names, including .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, and .com.

In 1982, an Internet protocol was defined by Ken Harrenstien and Vic White, both of Feinler's group, which provided access to an online directory of people, WHOIS. In 1983, ARPANET was converted to transmission-control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) format and became the Internet.

When Feinler retired from the NIC in 1989, she had worked as its principal investigator from 1974 to 1985 and as its director from 1985 to 1989. In 1989, Feinler joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at Ames Research Center, where she worked as a networks requirements manager and helped develop guidelines for managing the NASA Science Internet (NSI).

Over her career, Feinler conscientiously preserved a massive amount of archival information related to the Internet's evolution, once even saving papers off the floor before they could be thrown away. Upon retiring from SRI, Feinler donated an extensive collection of archives (which had filled two garages) to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, where she worked as a volunteer organizing her material. According to the museum's newsletter, Feinler runs the Volunteer Steering Committee as if the museum were a Silicon Valley start-up.

Personal Life

“Jake” Feinler got her nickname from her older sister, Mary Lou. It was common to have two first names at the time, and Feinler was nicknamed Betty Jo, short for Elizabeth Jocelyn. However, Mary Lou, only two at the time, mispronounced her name as “Baby Jake.” To Feinler's delight, the “Baby” was later dropped, although “Jake” stuck.

Feinler enjoys sewing, painting watercolors, and listening to opera. She has a witty, keen sense of humor and a knack for storytelling. To emphasize how tedious research was before the advent of the Internet, she tells of thumbing through enormous volumes of abstracts and skimming printed articles manually. Once she scoured volumes of information to locate the composition for walrus milk in order to save a baby walrus. Today, such feats could be accomplished with a few quick clicks.

Feinler continues to volunteer at the Computer History Museum. Summarizing the Internet's legacy, she has said that what was once an amazing experiment is no longer an experiment, but the greatest technological achievement of our time.

Bibliography

Braman, Sandra. “The Framing Years: Policy Fundamentals in the Internet Design Process.” Information Society 27.5 (2011): 295–310. Print.

Feinler, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler, an Oral History.” Interview by Jane Abbate. IEEE Global History Network. 2002. Web. 12 July 2012.

---. “Host Tables, Top-Level Domain Names and the Origin of Dot.com.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32.3 (2011): 83–89. Print.

---. “The Network Information Center and Its Archives.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33.3 (2010): 74–79. Print.

Lukasik, Stephen. “Why the ARPANET Was Built.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33.3 (2011): 4–21. Print.