Jon Postel

Jonathan Bruce Postel (/pəˈstɛl/; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium.

The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Career

Postel attended Van Nuys High School, and then UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.A. (1968) in Engineering. He then went on to complete his Ph.D. there in Computer Science in 1974, with Dave Farber as his thesis advisor.

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Famous quotes by Jon Postel:

"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."
"reserved for infrastructure purposes to help ensure stable operation of the Internet."
"But I do have a computer at home and a pretty good ISDN connection."
"The world wide web has really been quite spectacular and not something I would have predicted."
"Everyone should have ten megabits and then the web will be a wonderful thing."
"Group discussion is very valuable; group drafting is less productive."
"That was clearly surprising, interesting - a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it."
"The routers get involved in this and they know that on the path between this router and that router a certain percentage of the bandwidth is reserved to these things and a certain percentage of it is allowed on a first come first served basis."
"I got involved when I was a graduate student at UCLA when UCLA was the first site on the net."
"I think that audio and video over the internet in the sense of teleconferencing and telephone calls. Maybe we'll actually have picture phone through your work station."
"There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational."
"I also administer the Internet Assigned Names Authority, which is the central coordinator for the Internet address space, domain names and Internet protocol conventions essential to the use and operation of the Internet."
"One of the things that is not so good is that a decision was made long ago about the size of an IP address - 32 bits. At the time it was a number much larger than anyone could imagine ever having that many computers but it turned out to be to small."
"Corporate documents, like football game plans, are not easily drafted in a stadium, with thousands of very interested fans participating, each with their own red pencil, trying to reach a consensus on every word."
"Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving the use of one computer to measure the performance of another computer."
"One way to get high speed to the home is over cable systems."
"If you're in charge of managing domain name space you should treat everybody who asks for a registration the same. Whatever that is - whether it's nice or ugly or whatever - just be fair, treat them all the same."
"All this stuff was done via FTP but the web has put a really nice user interface on it."
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How the U.S. defense ministry created the internet

Interesting Engineering 02 Feb 2024
In the 1960s, an audacious proposal by Joseph Licklider changed the course of history ... The proposal was simple yet revolutionary ... To solve this problem, Dr. Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel created the Domain Name System (DNS) in the early 1980s ... .
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