Elizabeth J. Feinler

Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler is an American information scientist who directed the Network Information Systems Center at Stanford Research Institute from 1972 until 1989. Her group operated the Network Information Center for the ARPANET as it evolved into the Defense Data Network and the Internet. While there, she and her team created the Host Naming Registry, the service that became WHOIS, and the top level domain naming convention of .com, .gov, .org and related suffixes that the network still uses today. That naming and directory work let the network's fast growing population of computers organize themselves by kind instead of by memorized numeric address, turning raw network wiring into something a person could actually navigate, part of the infrastructure that later digital and networked media were built on top of. She later worked at NASA's Ames Research Center and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.