Paul Mockapetris was born in Boston, Mass., on November 18, 1948. He received dual bachelor’s degrees in physics and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1971, then moved west, relocating to the University of California, Irvine, where he conducted work on distributed systems and LAN technology that preceded the commercial Ethernet and Token Ring designs.

Mockapetris received a doctorate in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine, in 1982. He then joined the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and later was appointed Director of ISI’s High Performance Computing and Communications Division. During his stint at ISI, he became involved in the creation of the Internet, first working on the design of the SMTP e-mail protocol for implementation on the Internet in 1993, and then inventing the domain name system (DNS). Mockapetris operated the original root servers for the Internet.

After the formal creation of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1986, DNS became one of the original standards of the Internet. Mockapetris has been associated with the IETF since its creation, chairing several DNS and non-DNS working groups. He was Chair of the IETF from 1994 to 1996.

Mockapetris became program manager for networking at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the early 1990s, supervising efforts such as gigabit and optical networking. From 1995 on, he held leadership roles at several Silicon Valley networking startups, including @Home, Software.com (now OpenWave), Fiberlane (now Cisco), and Siara (now Redback Networks).

Mockapetris first became involved with Nominum in 2002. He started by doing due diligence for a potential investor, and then he was asked to help the company raise capital. He stayed on once the financing was complete, taking the roles of Chairman of the Board and Chief Scientist. Still living in California, Mockapetris is married and has three sons.

Mohney: How does today’s Internet match up with the vision you had in college?

Mockapetris: I’m a “seasoned professional” who is old, and my undergrad computer experiences were totally related to jobs I took to raise money while I studied physics at MIT. I had two simultaneous jobs–one at the Architecture Machine Project, which became the Media Lab, and one at IBM working on a system called CP/CMS. The two experiences were totally different. While we had some conventional resources at the Arch Mach like timesharing time, we mostly worked with multiple minicomputers, which were the kind of donations we could scrounge in the early days. At IBM I had the resources of a company at the top of its game, and the work I personally did there consumed more computing resources than a lot of companies or universities of that era.

While the systems of that era are obsolete, the ideas are amazingly fresh. At IBM, I was working on implementing more efficient virtual machines to run multiple operating systems, and at MIT I was working on allowing architects (the kind that build buildings, not Web 2.0 apps) to use multiple minicomputers to collaboratively get more work done than they could on a single machine. The architects didn’t really care that they were doing state-of-the-art distributed computing and network file systems; they just wanted something that was easy to use.

There are two possible conclusions we can draw from this: Either the field hasn’t made much progress, or technologies for breaking up problems and solving them on distributed systems will always be at the forefront of the industry–we will just be solving harder and harder problems.