Paul Mockapetris


Paul V. Mockapetris is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, who, together with Jon Postel, invented the Internet Domain Name System.

Education

Mockapetris graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1966, received his bachelor's degrees in physics and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971 and his doctorate in information and computer science from the University of California at Irvine in 1982.

Career

In 1983, he proposed a Domain Name System architecture in RFC 882 and RFC 883. He had recognized the problem in the early Internet of holding name to address translations in a single table on the hosts file of an operating system. Instead he proposed a distributed and dynamic DNS database: essentially DNS as it exists today.

Achievements

Mockapetris is a fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery. He: