Elizabeth Feinler, known as Jake, was a crucial part of the technological revolution now known as the Internet, and manager of one of SRI’s most financially rewarding centers for more than 20 years.
Jake was leading the Literature Research section of SRI’s library in 1967 when the Advanced Research Projects Agency was planning the ARPANET. By 1969, Doug Engelbart recruited Jake to join his Augmentation Research Center to help plan and organize the Network Information Center (NIC) for the planned ARPANET.
As the ARPANET came online in 1969, the NIC was responsible for giving instructions on how to interface a host to the network, issuing ARPANET numeric and symbolic addresses, maintaining the library, and distributing RFCs (Request for Comments)—the initial standards for the evolving ARPANET. Jake and people like Jon Postel worked very hard in the early days to establish the RFCs as the official set of technical notes. This was not an easy job, because there were many parallel efforts and splinter groups. For example, after endless meetings about whether the domain name system should have a logical or a geographic basis, Jake shouted that enough was enough and she was making the choice. Because she did, we now have .com, .gov, .org.
By 1972, when Jake became Principal Investigator for the NIC project, the ARPANET was growing rapidly. The SRI NLS Journal became the bibliographic search service of the ARPANET. It provided the first links to on-line documents. By 1976, when email and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) had been implemented, the NIC developed methods for delivering information to users via distributed information servers across the network.
The NIC was at SRI for about 22 years, from 1969 until 1991. That was an enormous run and most of that time, the renewal of the project was almost totally Jake’s doing. She did a great job of pleasing first ARPA and then the Defense Communications Agency (DCA). When Jake left SRI and the NIC project in 1989, there were about 30,000 hosts on what was becoming known as the Internet. Today there are millions. Jake Feinler made a difference—to the fortunes of SRI and to the future of the Internet.