Paul V. Mockapetris

Inventor of the Domain Name System, Mockapetris is sometimes acknowledged, together with Jon Postel, as the creator of DNS.

Mockapetris received his Bachelor's Degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Doctorate in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine.

In 1983, he proposed a Domain Name System (DNS) architecture in RFCs 882 and 883 while at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California. Mockapetris had recognized the problem in the early Internet (then ARPAnet) of holding name to address translations in a single table on a single host, and instead proposed a distributed and dynamic DNS database: essentially DNS as we have it today.

In 1995, he left academia to become employee number two at @Home, where his efforts helped to bring broadband Internet to the home via cable modem. Mockapetris became Chairman of Nominum, Inc. in 1999, a company which supplied DNS software to the world's leading network carriers.

He received the 1997 John C. Dvorak Telecommunications Excellence Award "Personal Achievement - Network Engineering" for DNS design and implementation, the 2003 IEEE Internet Award for his contributions to DNS, and the Distinguished Alumnus award from the University of California, Irvine. In May 2005, Mockapetris received the ACM Sigcomm lifetime award.

Among his publications are: RFC 1034 — "Domain Names - Concepts And Facilities"; RFC 1035 — "Domain Names - Implementation And Specification"; and RFC 973 — "Domain System Changes and Observations."