Elizabeth J.
Feinler

BIO:

Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1931. She was the first in her family to graduate from college. She graduated from West Liberty University with a degree in chemistry in 1954. Feinler then went on to do graduate work at Purdue University in Indiana 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, Feinler joined Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) to work on the ARPANET Resource Handbook. Feinler was principal investigator for the Network Information Center (NIC) project from 1974 to 1989. During that time, Feinler’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 Feinler’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; an early version of our current email system. Feinler became the director of the Network Information Systems Center at SRI in 1986. She left in 1989 to work for Sterling Software Corporation. While there, Feinler 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.

Feinler was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012. Since retiring, she has been a consultant at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, 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.