Connecting The Dot-Com

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Command Line Heroes • • Connecting The Dot-Com | Command Line Heroes

Connecting The Dot-Com | Command Line Heroes

About the episode

The year is 1995. The internet starts going mainstream and the dot-com bubble begins its rapid inflation. But 10 years before all of this, a small team of systems administrators made a seemingly simple decision that would turn out to have a monumental impact on these events and would set the course of the internet for the foreseeable future.

Dr. W. Joseph Campbell sets the stage for our season on the internet in 1995. Claire L. Evans explains how hard it was to find anything on the early internet. One team was charged with compiling that information in the early days of the ARPANET. Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler recounts being the internet’s sole librarian in those early days, and how she helped come up with the rules for future domain names. Paul Mockapetris describes designing the domain name system they later implemented as the internet went from a public network to a private business. And Ben Tarnoff explains the results of that increasingly privatized internet.

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As we approach the turn of the century, communication methods are changing drastically. Internet technology uses computer networks to link people around the world. Millions of Americans have a personal... Millions of Americans have a personal computer in their home. These Americans can glimpse into the future online. By the year 2000, every business will be on the internet. 1995. That year, the world's imagination was sparked. A networking technology that few understood had been developing for decades, and then it burst into the public sphere. Movies like The Net and Hackers and Johnny Mnemonic captured our new obsession. An arcane series of virtual tubes called the internet had been brought to life by the creation of the World Wide Web. And tens of millions of people were jumping online. I'm Saron Yitbarek and this is season 7 of Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. This season, we're looking at that year—1995—from every angle. We're exploring how that moment in our tech history gave birth to the online world we know today. From e-commerce to web design, to search engines, and so much more. It certainly was a watershed year in the popular emergence of the internet. Professor W. Joseph Campbell is the author of 1995: The Year the Future Began. It was a moment when the internet goes from obscurity to near ubiquity. There was a critical mass of users, there was a critical mass of content and there was a relatively easy way to get there. And that way to get there was the Netscape browser. And it really just took the web from, and the internet from, obscurity to prominence during that 12-month period. In fact, Netscape's IPO on August 9th of that year made it a multi-billion dollar success overnight. The IPO of Netscape really ignited a great deal of interest and made it very clear to lots of people that there was a lot of money that could be made online. The dot-com bubble was born. While movie-goers were lining up to see Sandra Bullock in The Net, investors were lining up to buy stocks in anything that had a dot-com attached to its name. The tech-dominated NASDAQ Composite index would quadruple over the next 5 years. That dot-com bubble transformed the tech landscape and few investors had any idea what those words "dot-com" really meant. So we're launching our new season with a little history lesson for those mid-90s traders. It's the story of the invention of dot-com itself. Before the dot-com boom—long before you could hop on GoDaddy to grab yourself a domain name–there was a woman you'd have to call. The keeper of all domains. Her name was Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler. Back in 1972, the newly-built ARPANET, godfather of our internet, consisted of about 30 computers. "Three-zero." And one of the major nodes of that fledgling network was at Stanford Research Institute. That's where information scientist, Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, worked. And people like her, wizards of information management, indexing and data organization, were about to become incredibly useful. Because networks require order as they grow–or else they collapse. Douglas Engelbart, the engineer who became famous for his work on human-computer interactions, was then running the Stanford lab. And he enlisted Feinler, giving her the task of writing a resource handbook for the first demo of the ARPANET. Basically, that was a contact list of technical liaisons and administrative liaisons for all the host sites. Organizing information for a network of 30 computers was easy enough. This was, after all, just supposed to be a way for researchers to bounce information back and forth between universities. Not a ton of pressure organizing something like that. But–and you're probably ahead of me here–that was about to change. Try to imagine: a few dozen host sites and a few dozen universities, military bases, and research centers. Each one with different resources. The military sites were way more secure, of course. The university sites were often run by students. There was no consistent organization. There was no search engine to any of this. Claire L. Evans is the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. In order for it to be even remotely useful to anyone, they had to know exactly what they were looking for, where that something was, when it was online, and who could give them access. And the only way they could really do that was by getting in touch with Jake Feinler and the Network Information Center, who had all the information about what was where. The Network Information Center, or NIC for short, was Jake Feinler's domain. And she was literally the keeper of the internet's phone book. If you wanted to connect to a resource somewhere on the network, you had to call Jake's team. Picture this: you're a researcher at MIT and you want to access a computer at UCLA. You can't just type in a web address because the World Wide Web doesn't exist yet. Instead, you call up the NIC. We were like the 411 of the internet. People would call us up and say, "I'm looking for so-and-so who works on such-and-such a project." And we'd say, "Oh, he's at this site," and give them the phone number or tell them how to access that particular computer. Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler became the internet's first and only librarian. Every week, she and her team published something called the "Official ARPANET Directory." It was a phone book for the early internet, complete with names, addresses, phone numbers, and technical specifications for every single site on the network. We kept track of what was at each site, what kind of computers they had, what programming languages were available, what databases were accessible, who the people were that you could contact for help. We had to keep track of everything because there was no other way to find anything. But as the network grew from 30 computers to 300, and then to 3,000, Feinler realized they needed a better system. The phone book approach wasn't going to scale. They needed a way to organize and categorize information that would work even as the network continued to expand. We started thinking about how to organize things in a hierarchical way. We looked at the phone system, which had area codes and exchanges. We thought, "What if we could do something similar for computer addresses?" This is where the story gets really interesting. Because Feinler and her team were about to invent something that would become fundamental to how we navigate the internet today: the domain name system. But first, they had to solve a more basic problem. How do you organize the internet? We decided to use categories based on the type of organization. So we had .edu for educational institutions, .gov for government, .mil for military, .org for other organizations, and .com for commercial. And then later we added .net for network service providers and .int for international organizations. That's right. Jake Feinler and her team at Stanford Research Institute invented the top-level domains that we use today. .com, .edu, .gov, .org—all of these came from their work in the 1980s. But at the time, they had no idea how significant these categories would become. We just thought of them as convenient filing categories. We had no idea that .com would become this huge commercial thing. Back then, there weren't really any commercial entities on the internet. It was mostly universities and government agencies. The domain name system that Feinler's team designed was elegant in its simplicity. But implementing it would require a much more sophisticated technical infrastructure. That's where Paul Mockapetris comes in. When I was asked to design the Domain Name System in the early 1980s, I was working at USC's Information Sciences Institute. The problem was clear: the internet was growing rapidly, and the old system of maintaining a single hosts file was breaking down. Paul Mockapetris is the computer scientist who designed and implemented the Domain Name System (DNS) as we know it today. He took Feinler's organizational categories and turned them into a working technical system. The genius of Jake's system was that it was hierarchical and distributed. Instead of trying to maintain one central database, we could have multiple databases that would work together. Each organization could manage its own piece of the namespace. Mockapetris designed DNS to be robust and scalable. It could handle millions of domain names without breaking down. And it was designed to be fault-tolerant—if one part of the system failed, the rest would keep working. We knew the internet was going to keep growing, but I don't think any of us anticipated just how big it would become. We designed DNS to handle growth, but the scale we're seeing today—hundreds of millions of domain names—is beyond what we imagined. By the late 1980s, the Domain Name System was operational. But the internet was still primarily an academic and government network. Commercial activity was largely prohibited. That was about to change in a big way. In the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation began allowing commercial traffic on the internet. Suddenly, businesses could use the network for profit. And they needed domain names to establish their online presence. The job of registering domain names was handed over to a company called Network Solutions. For the first time, you had to pay for a domain name. The era of free internet addresses was over. This was a pivotal moment in internet history. The transition from a free, academic network to a commercial one was beginning. And at the center of it all were those simple three-letter extensions that Jake Feinler had invented years earlier. What's fascinating about this story is how Jake Feinler's work—this very practical, organizational work—ended up having such enormous economic and cultural impact. She was just trying to keep the internet organized and functional. But her decisions about how to categorize things ended up shaping the entire structure of the commercial internet. By 1995, when the dot-com boom was taking off, investors were throwing money at any company with a .com in its name. But they probably had no idea that .com was just one of several categories that a librarian had come up with to organize the early internet. The privatization of the internet accelerated throughout the 1990s. Government agencies handed over more and more control to private companies and non-profit organizations. The days when Jake Feinler could personally manage the entire internet directory were long gone. The privatization of the internet wasn't inevitable. It was a choice—a political and ideological choice. The people making these decisions believed that private companies could run the internet more efficiently than government agencies. Ben Tarnoff is the author of Internet for the People. He argues that the privatization of the internet has had far-reaching consequences that we're still dealing with today. When you hand over control of critical internet infrastructure to private companies, you're essentially saying that profit motives should drive decisions about how the internet works. That has led to all kinds of problems—from domain name speculation to the digital divide. Today, the domain name system is managed by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It's a non-profit organization, but it operates very differently from the way Jake Feinler ran the Network Information Center. ICANN has introduced hundreds of new top-level domains over the years. Some of them, like .sucks, seem designed primarily to extract money from companies that feel they have to protect their brand names. It's a very different philosophy from the early days when the focus was on organization and functionality. The contrast is striking. Jake Feinler and her team created .com as a simple organizational category. Today, .com domains are bought and sold like real estate, sometimes for millions of dollars. I never imagined that domain names would become so valuable. We just thought of them as addresses—a way to find things on the network. We had no idea they would become brands and marketing tools and investment vehicles. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jake Feinler's story is how little recognition she received for her foundational work on the internet. While the entrepreneurs and investors of the dot-com boom became famous and wealthy, the people who built the underlying systems largely remained in the background. Jake Feinler is a perfect example of how women's contributions to technology have been overlooked and undervalued. She did absolutely critical work that made the internet possible, but most people have never heard of her. Meanwhile, the people who came later and commercialized the systems she built became household names. The story of the domain name system is really the story of the internet's transformation from a collaborative, academic project to a commercial enterprise. And at the heart of that transformation are the organizational principles that Jake Feinler established in the early days. Today, when we type a web address into our browser, we're using a system that traces back to Jake Feinler's work in the 1970s and 1980s. Every .com, every .org, every .edu—they all originated from her vision of how to organize the internet. I'm proud of the work we did. I think we created something that has stood the test of time. But I also sometimes wonder what the internet would look like if we had made different choices—if we had designed it to be less commercial, more focused on sharing and collaboration. As we navigate the internet today, it's worth remembering the people like Jake Feinler who built the foundation that everything else rests on. Their decisions—made decades ago in a very different context—continue to shape our digital world. The Domain Name System has been one of the most successful and enduring technologies of the internet age. It just works, reliably, all the time. That's a testament to the solid foundation that Jake and her team established. The next time you see a .com address, remember Jake Feinler. Remember that behind every click, every purchase, every search, there are people who built the systems that make it all possible. People who saw the potential of networks to connect the world, and who did the often invisible work of making that vision a reality. The spirit of the early internet was about this kind of convivial sharing of resources, the collective building of something larger than the sum of its parts. It was really mostly used and inhabited by its builders. So there was this spirit of kind of collective enterprise. As the user base grew, though, the potential for profits was growing, too. All that tech was about to be monetized. Soon, Network Solutions was charging—$100 bucks for 2 years of registration. Meanwhile, in the early '90s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) handed operation of its backbone to a consortium of Michigan universities that were working with companies like IBM and MCI. But we'll get into that story in our next episode. For now, what you need to know is that the NSF believed that the private sector was a necessary partner if the internet was ever going to grow to its full potential. Ben Tarnoff, author of the book Internet for the People, told us about that moment when the NSF was overseeing privatization. He describes the bind that Stephen Wolff, the foundation's director, was in. Key problems that he was looking at, it's primarily a capacity problem. How are we going to find the money to continue to upgrade our backbone, to keep pace with the type of infrastructure investments that we will need to make in order to accommodate all of this demand, as more and more people want to use the internet? And how are we going to broaden out to serve not just the academic community, not just the researcher community, but the wider public? As non-commercial as the internet may have been, there was general agreement that privatization was the only way forward. Indeed, the political climate at the time in the early to mid '90s—which was an intensely deregulatory political climate—there were very few opposition figures who sounded the alarm or raised criticisms to these moves, at least in the mainstream political space. Government would continue to give away and delegate functions to the private sector. And that process has been rolling out for decades. The handoff hasn't only moved toward companies, though. Non-profits have taken over from the government too. So there's a non-profit called ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which among other things, governs the Domain Name System. And they cut an arrangement in the late '90s when ICANN was created, with the Commerce Department, which at the time still controlled the Domain Name System nominally. But they reached an agreement where ICANN essentially will run it on the Commerce Department's behalf. And in fact, that arrangement was in place until 2016, at which point ICANN formally took sole control over the Domain Name System. The withdrawal of government and academic management—the withdrawal of people like Feinler–felt inevitable. But Tarnoff feels it may have been more ideological in the end. There was nothing inevitable, nothing technically mandated, about the path that the internet took. It could have taken a different path, and it could still. So I think the privatization of the internet was absolutely an ideological choice. The people who were involved in engineering it were not primarily technical. They were politicians, bureaucrats, policy makers who were participating in this broad ideological consensus around neoliberalism, around deregulation, around the need for the private sector to lead. When the people organizing and indexing the internet are no longer library scientists like Feinler, that changes the rules. For example, compare Feinler's decisions about top-level domains with this more recent decision. ICANN has released these new top-level domains and they released one for instance called dot-sucks. And they were accused of being essentially predatory for releasing this domain because every brand, every corporation in the world has to go out and buy their dot-sucks domain. The way we organize and manage the internet matters. And when you remember the pioneers who organized it in the first place, the way their decisions live with us still, you can't help but wonder how our decisions are organizing the future right now. When you follow the origin story of top-level domains, you eventually get a story about not just organization, but privatization. And nowhere is that more obvious than in that crazy moment in 1995, when the dot-com bubble began. You had a capitalist feeding frenzy epitomized by two simple words, that a public institution had set up: dot-com. And yet, people like Feinler who managed and organized the online arena, never got rich and famous. All those investors back in 1995, probably thought they were pretty smart for picking up any stock with a dot-com in its name. And you can bet that when Network Solutions sold to Verisign for $21 billion, they were pretty pleased with themselves, too. But the people who really gave dot-com its value were heroes like Jake Feinler, Paul Mockapetris, and Ken Harrenstien. You can check out loads of bonus material about Feinler and the invention of top-level domains over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. Next time: we zoom in on that day in 1995 when the NSFNET was shuttered and the internet's privatization took a giant leap forward. I'm Saron Yitbarek and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. Keep on coding.

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Command Line Heroes

During its run from 2018 to 2022, Command Line Heroes shared the epic true stories of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels, and how they revolutionized the technology landscape. Relive our journey through tech history, and use #CommandLinePod to share your favorite episodes.