[ih] Very early days of the IANA

[Suzanne Woolf]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 09:36:06AM -0500, Craig Partridge wrote:
> As to when this role was renamed "IANA", I don't know.  The first time I
> could find refering to an IANA instead of "Jon" or "Joyce" was RFC 1060
> (March 1990).  There's a three year gap from RFC 1010 (which still
> says "Joyce").

I started working at ISI in 1989, and "IANA" was established by then
as the term for the operation at ISI that gave address (still often
called "Class A") blocks to the three RIRs, oversaw changes to TLD
nameservers and whois data (with Network Solutions as "InterNIC"
actually generating the DNS root zone file, which caused no end of
trouble later), and kept protocol parameters records for the IETF. I
was doing unix and DEC20 systems support then, and was told early on
that if people said they needed something for IANA, it was important.

I believe I first saw the term in contract language some years later,
when I joined the Networking group and booked most of my time against
the same DARPA contract that funded IANA, administration of .US, the
RFC Editor, and a bunch of other random and possibly-useful things,
including my participation at my first-ever IETF under a catch-all
that Jon told me I should think of as "do good things for the
Internet"-- one of the cool things he did that people don't generally
know about was encourage (young, then!) people who thought this
networking stuff was unbelievably powerful and fun to go figure out
how to make their own contribution.

As to exactly when the term "IANA" was blessed by (D)ARPA as the
description of the associated functions, I don't know. Mike St. Johns
might, or his contemporaries in (D)ARPA-ISTO.


Suz