Knowbot Information Service
A meta-search across the internet's fragmented people directories, run by the organisation Robert Kahn founded.
Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf coined "knowbot" in the late 1980s for software agents that would roam between network services and fetch information on a user's behalf. The Knowbot Information Service, KIS, was the concrete application CNRI ran out of Reston, Virginia in the early 1990s.
The problem it addressed was that there were too many people directories and none of them complete: whois at the NIC, X.500 directories, MCI Mail, finger servers on individual hosts. KIS accepted a query over telnet or email, put it to every source, and returned the answers in a single format. It was clever and slow, and like much else it was made redundant by the web, which made it easy for every organisation to publish a directory of its own.