Date of Birth:
1931Date of Death:
PresentSECTORS:
BIO:
Elizabeth J. Feinler was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1931. She was the first in her family to graduate from college when she graduated from West Liberty University with a degree in chemistry in 1954. She then went on to do graduate work at Purdue in biochemistry. She moved to Silicon Valley in 1960 to start a position in the Information Research Department at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park. In 1972, Elizabeth joined Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) to work on the ARPANET Resource Handbook. Elizabeth was principal investigator for the Network Information Center (NIC) project from 1974 to 1989. During that time, Elizabeth’s NIC group worked on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which evolved into the Defense Data Network (DDN), both forerunners to the Internet.
It was also Elizabeth’s group who managed the first host-naming registry for the Internet and developed the domain naming system of .com, .gov, .org, .edu, and .mil, which is still in use today. Her group also developed a program called PCSam, which downloaded emails from servers to user’s personal computers, which was an early version of our current email system. Elizabeth became the director of the Network Information Systems Center at SRI in 1986. She left in 1989 to work for Sterling Software Corp. While there, Elizabeth worked as a contract network requirements manager at NASA Ames Research Center, where she helped develop guidelines for managing the NASA Science Internet (NSI), NIC and the NASA websites.
Elizabeth was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012. Since retiring, she has been a consultant at The Computer History Museum, where she donated, organized, and detailed over 350 boxes of archives from the Engelbart and NIC projects.
Womanhood is a public art and digital media project that promotes the historical contributions of women to Santa Clara County. https://womanhoodproject.org/
Womanhood is supported by the County of Santa Clara Office of Women’s Policy.

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Project Artist & Trigger Image Source: Kiana Honarmand
Profile: Faces of Open-Source project by photographer Peter Adams