> > The Defense Department in 1985 assigned SRI International, a nonprofit > >Silicon Valley research institute, the job of registering second-level > >domains in the generic (non-country code) top-level domains. Later on, the > >National Science Foundation (NSF) assumed the lead from the Defense > >Department in funding basic Internet infrastructure. In 1992, NSF > >established a new structure known as the InterNIC, or Internet Network > >Information Center. I wasn't exactly new, just another. I still have on my shelf "Internet Manager's Phonebook" published by the NSF Network Service Center (NNSC) at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. in 1990 They introductions goes - "The Internet Manager's Phone Book was compiled by the staff of the NSF Network Service Center (NNSC), and tries to list everyone who was responsible for a domain name or IP network number as of 1 August 1990. The data in this phone book was compiled from a wide variety of sources, including the DDN Network Information Center's WHOIS database, the domain name system, data kept at the NNSC, and responses to an electronic questionaire that the NNSC mailed out in late July. The NNSC produced this phone book at the request of members of the Internet Engineering Task Force, Members of the task force had observed that it was often difficult for network managers to locate the proper people to call when debugging network problems. Two key difficulties were that contact information is scattered over several databases, and providing a hardcopy which cannot be affected by network outages (we hope!). This phone book is an experiment. Free copies are being sent to all the network administrators listed in the contacts section. (Additional copies may be purchased from the NNSC at cost). If the phone book proves valuable, we will try to generate the phone book again next year. ... How to update your entry The NNSC is not maintaining the phone book database. We feared that if we did so, we create a situation in which the Internet had yet another (eventually) incomplete database of contact information. Instead, when we generate subsequent phone books, we will retrieve the information from the existing databases again. All updates that we received while compiling the phone book were forwarded to the DDN Network Information Center for inclusion in their database."
