One of the people who has been involved in the Internet industry since the early days remembers the period around the turn of the century as a "pretty volatile time" as the network was moving from being a niche technology to mainstream.
A lone individual, Robert Elz, managed the domain name system for the .au domain from the time Australia hooked up to the Internet until he was forced to pass it over to a the current organisation, auDA, in 2001.