Dr. Paul Mockapetris
Paul Mockapetris is an Internet advocate and angel. His primary research interests are in distributed systems and computer communication protocols. He is best known for creating the Domain Name System, which is the key name registration basis for the Internet. Accordingly Paul is well known as a speaker and teacher in several Internet areas.
From 2001-1999, Paul was founder and CTO for UrbanMedia, a company that provided conventional telephony and Internet services in office buildings. From 1998-1999, Paul was CTO for Fiberlane/Cerent/Siara, now Redback where he worked on high speed networking melding ASIC, SONET, and IP technologies.
During 1997, Paul was Chief Technology Officer at Software.Com, where he worked on the development of Internet infrastructure technology for messaging, directory and DNS. From 1995-1996, Paul was the second employee and Director of Engineering at @Home, a company with the mission of bringing high-performance Internet to millions via cable TV. During Paul's tenure, @Home grew from a 2-person company to a 200-person company, with production service in 3 regions and deployment underway in 10 more. From 1990-1993 Paul was the program manager for networking at ARPA, where he started and oversaw dozens of research efforts scattered across the US and Europe.
From 1978-1995, Paul was at USC's Information Sciences Institute, beginning as a graduate student and ending as Director of the High Performance Computing and Communications Division.
As an individual contributor at ISI, he is best known as the creator of the Domain Name System (DNS), and its first implementer; he worked on the design of mail systems and wrote the first implementation of SMTP; and created the infrastructure contract for the CAIRN (Dartnet II) research network. Research projects under his supervision at ISI included RSVP, Prospero, NetCheque, ATOMIC, and the Routing Arbiter. His division also ran Los Nettos, a regional network and supported Internet infrastructure through IANA and other projects.
At UC Irvine, he worked on ring interface, later commercialized by Proteon and IBM. He received his degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, in 1982.