Paul Mockapetris

Inventor of the Domain Name System

• Born: November 18, 1948
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

Primary Company/Organization: Nominum

Introduction

Paul Mockapetris is best known for creating the Domain Name System (DNS), which has helped structure the distribution of e-mail messages and Internet communications on multiuser networks. He is also responsible for a number of other Internet-related achievements that have led to his induction into the Internet Hall of Fame and having received numerous awards and distinctions. After a lengthy career in academia, in 1995 he entered the commercial sector to work as chair and chief scientist at Nominum, Inc., which creates software to assist in DNS applications.

Early Life

Paul V. Mockapetris was born and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended high school there. At that time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offered free summer classes to anyone interested. The classes were often taught by MIT students, and Mockapetris took two, both taught by students who went on to become MIT professors. One class was on programming, and through it, he gained his first experience with a computer, an IBM 1620. The computer the class used was part of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. One day, a department secretary asked him if he was a student and whether he would like a key to the computer room. Mockapetris said yes, accepted the key, and began using the computer late at night, when it was free; later he realized that the secretary had been asking whether he was an MIT student, not a student in the summer program. In any case, Mockapetris quickly developed an aptitude for computers that inspired him to study the subject at the tertiary level. He earned undergraduate degrees in physics and engineering from MIT in 1971. He then achieved a PhD in information and computer science from the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine in 1982.

Life's Work

In his early career, Mockapetris found himself working on research projects that were poorly funded and reliant on small computers that had been donated rather than the larger machines then available on a permanent or time-share basis. This inspired a career-long interest in the issues of dealing with distributed information systems and how to organize networks to improve productivity from using them. As a member of USC's Information Science Institute, where he was later to become director of the High Performance Computing and Communications Division, he was at first involved with the development of simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP). SMTP was introduced in 1983 as part of the introduction of the e-mail system internationally. Mockapetris then began to work on the creation of the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is important in that, since the 1990s, it has enabled the conversion of the names entered by users (URLs or e-mail addresses) into the unique numerical string that identifies the actual location of the required machine and destination on the network concerned. This system has worked successfully to date, and Mockapetris believes it has the scope to continue to work and grow in the future. Nevertheless, it is true that the system evolved in a setting determined first by university researchers in Western, developed countries and then spread to industrial settings and the general population around the world. The use of different alphabets, which has become increasingly practicable, may nevertheless pose problems for the DNS that might require a transition to a newer system, such as electronic numbering (ENUM).

While Mockapetris was instrumental in the technical aspects of DNS and later developments, he has always tried to steer clear of the political aspects: for example, controversies over whether consistency of usage over international borders is required or new designations should be introduced. In some sources, Jon Postel is described as a cocreator of the DNS.

The DNS was one of the original Internet standards that was designated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), with which Mockapetris has been associated subsequently and which he chaired from 1994 to 1996. In the first half of the 1990s, he was a member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was involved in developing more sophisticated networking technologies, including optical networking. In 1995, he moved into the corporate sector and became involved with a number of start-up operations. In doing so, he has developed his own entrepreneurial philosophy, which revolves around the needs for simplicity, clear communication of objectives and methods to stakeholders, and early planning for extensions and sophistication of the original base system.

Mockapetris also served as chair and chief scientist at Nominum, Inc., a company that provides software solutions related to DNS and the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP). He has been associated with a number of other software companies, including Acord Technologies, UrbanMedia Communication Corporation, and Sandlot Capital. In 2015, he began serving as the chief scientist for the cybersecurity firm ThreatStop.

Personal Life

Mockapetris and his wife, Elizabeth, have three sons: Alexander and fraternal twins Eric and William. He has listed wine tasting and tennis as his favorite pastimes. He is the recipient of several honors, including induction into the Internet Hall of Fame and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) lifetime award.

Bibliography

Levy, Steven. The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. New York: Simon, 2006. Print.

Ludwig, Sean. “DNS Inventor Paul Mockapetris to Startups: ‘Complexity Is Your Enemy,’” 13 July 2012. Venture Beat. Web. 12 July 2012.

Mockapetris, P., and K. J. Dunlop. “Development of the Domain Name System.” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 18.4 (1988): 123–33. Web. 12 July 2012.

Naughton, John. Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet. Woodstock: Overlook, 2000. Print.

“Paul V. Mockapetris: Ph.D. Chief Scientist and Chairman Nominum.” 2006. WIWIW (Who Is Who in the Internet World?). Web. 12 July 2012.

“Peter Mockapetris: Chairman and Chief Scientist.” 2012. Nominum. Web. 12 July 2012.

Schafer, Valerie. "Tell Us About...(Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Abhaya Indurawa, Dennis Jennings, John Klensin, Gerard Le Lann, Paul Mockapetris and Ted Nelson)." In Oral Histories of the Internet and the Web, Niels Brugger and Gerard Goggin, eds. Routledge, 2022. Print.