Textbook of Linux

b. 1963, United States — Chair, Internet Systems Consortium; BIND 4/8 principal author

Also known as: Vixie

Paul Vixie maintained BIND — the Berkeley Internet Name Domain server — from 1989 to 1999 and authored major versions 4, 8, and 9 (with contributors). BIND implements the DNS, the naming system without which no internet service works, and has been the dominant DNS server on Unix since the 1980s.

Vixie co-founded the Internet Systems Consortium in 1994 to take stewardship of BIND and related software, and later founded Farsight Security. He authored a dozen DNS-related IETF RFCs — including the Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS0) and Response Rate Limiting — and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

On Linux, you probably run a direct descendant of Vixie's code every time your machine resolves a hostname, unless you're using systemd-resolved.