SRI
The first central authority to coordinate the operation of the network was the Network Information Center (NIC). The NIC was based in Doug Engelbart's lab, the Augmentation Research Center, at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in Menlo Park, California.
In 1972, Elizabeth J. Feinler, better known as Jake, became principal investigator of the project. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned the numbers, while the NIC published them to the rest of the network. Jon Postel fulfilled the role of manager of IANA, in addition to his role as the RFC Editor, until his death in 1998.
The NIC provided reference service to users (initially over the phone and by physical mail), maintained and published a directory of people (the "white pages"), a resource handbook (the "yellow pages", a list of services) and the protocol handbook. After the Network Operations Center at Bolt, Bernek and Newman brought new hosts onto the network, the NIC registered names, provided access control for terminals, audit trail and billing information, and distributed Request for Comments (RFCs). Feinler, working with Steve Crocker, Jon Postel, Joyce Reynolds and other members of the Network Working Group (NWG), developed RFCs into the official set of technical notes for the ARPANET and later the Internet. The NIC provided the first links to online documents using the NLS Journal system developed at SRI's Augmentation Research Center.
On the ARPANET, hosts were given names to be used in place of numeric addresses. Owners of new hosts sent email to HOSTSMASTER@SRI-NIC.ARPA to request an address. A file named HOSTS.TXT was distributed by the NIC and manually installed on each host on the network to provide a mapping between these names and their corresponding network address. As the network grew, this became increasingly cumbersome. A technical solution came in the form of the Domain Name System, designed by Paul Mockapetris.
The Defense Data Network Network Information Center (DDN-NIC) at SRI handled all registration services, including the top-level domains mil, gov, edu, org, net, com and us. DDN-NIC also performed root nameserver administration and Internet number assignments under a United States Department of Defense contract starting in 1984.
Read more about this topic: InterNIC