ACM named Paul Mockapetris recipient of the ACM Software System Award for development of the Domain Name System (DNS), which provides the worldwide distributed directory service that is an essential component of the functionality of the global internet.

When the internet was first deployed in the early 1980s, the online community relied on a centrally-managed directory that matched human-friendly host names to numerical IP addresses of computers on the network. As the internet began to grow more rapidly, maintaining a single centralized host directory became slow and unwieldy, necessitating a new scalable architecture. To address this need, in 1983, Mockapetris designed and built the Domain Name System (DNS), creating the associated query protocol, a server implementation, and initial root servers. Taken together, these components provided the first stable operational DNS system.

When Mockapetris initially designed the DNS, the number of name lookups to establish the associated IP address were in the few thousands per day. Today, while still employing the core components that Mockapetris introduced 37 years ago, the DNS manages 350 million separately-managed domains, and responds to several tens of billions of queries each day.

DNS serves as a foundation for dozens of other applications, including email and web addresses. The Universal Resource Locator (URL) and Universal Resource Identifier (URI)—core components the World Wide Web—rely on domain names as introduced in the DNS system. While many of the new features of the DNS have been added by others, the ability of Mockapetris’s original design to incorporate these updates is a testament to his work.