Administrative Links

Starting at the top: a few links to the governing bodies of the Internet and computing in general.

ACM

The Association for Computing Machinery - anybody who is somebody writes for them and has always done so. This is the organization for programming gurus. Ritchie and Thompson published here for their introduction of UNIX, for example. The ACM's most famous publication has always been The Communications of the ACM (CACM).

Country Code Top-Level Domains

Want to know what a particular suffix means? What country it comes from? You don't need and you don't want software to tell you. Here is the official list of CCTLDs from IANA.

IANA

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, connected with USC, is responsible for the overall coordination and management of the Domain Name System. Pictured above is the grandaddy of the whole shebang, Dr. Jon Postel, whose untimely passing in October 1998 is still mourned by friends and netizens world wide.

ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is the new governing body of the Internet.

ISOC

The Internet Society - a more egregious organisation online is hard to find. Check out their membership list, and see who has helped found it (yes Billg is there too). Don't even consider applying for a gold corporate membership unless you really have money to throw around: dues are US$50K per annum.

Netiquette Guidelines

Originally written by Jon Postel, an 'RFC' for the net on 'how to behave'.