Elizabeth Feinler

Elizabeth Feinler was born on March 2, 1931, and grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1954, she graduated West Liberty University with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. She was researching biochemistry, but she needed money, so she got a job and developed an interest in streamlining information sorting. In 1972, she became a member of Dr. Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center where she developed and managed ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) which was a very simple version of the internet, where a limited number of computers could access it for academic and research purposes. She and her group at SRI International also developed the domain naming scheme of .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org, and .net. All of those domain names are still in use today. Elizabeth Feinler retired and is currently a volunteer for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.