Eric Brunner-Williams
I suppose I should put some content relevant to ICANN here.
I worked at SRI as the manager of the ISTC Computer Facility on the 3rd floor of the E Building of the Menlo Park campus during the period when the NIC was at SRI (Jake Feinler's and later Jose Garcia Luna's shop, 2nd floor, E Building). I was hired by Don Cone.
DDN Network Information Center SRI International, Room EJ291 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, CA 94025
I had this responsibility prior to the transition from hosttables to DNS zone files.
Subsequently I was accidentally involved, as note taker, in the initial "shared registry" model at IETF-49 (San Diego, December 2000), which posited a "shared" (partitioned) model for what we subsequently refer to as the "registry function", and was indifferent on what we subsequently refer to as the "registrar function". Of course, when ICANN implemented its "transition from monopoly to competitive" program, the legacy monopoly integrated registry-registrar (NetSol, now VGRS), insisted on putting "competition" in the "registrar function", retaining monopoly in the "registrar function", for .com/.net/.org. In the same time frame I was involved through the IETF in the IAHC-MoU activity, which also came to naught as Ira Magaziner selected Esther Dyson's proposal to form "the New Entity".