> > 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."
