Paul Mockapetris
More info
- Born
- Known for
- Invented DNS
- Nationality
- American
Replaced the central HOSTS.TXT file in 1983 with a distributed naming system — without which the internet would have stopped growing.
Until then, every host name on ARPANET lived in a single text file, maintained by hand and downloaded by every connected machine. With a few hundred hosts it worked; with tens of thousands it was untenable, both in update frequency and in traffic.
Mockapetris designed the solution at the Information Sciences Institute and described it in RFC 882 and 883: a hierarchical namespace with authority delegated downwards, and caching to keep query volume manageable. He has since noted that he underestimated the need for security in the protocol, which is the backdrop to DNSSEC.