Jon Postel

Jon Postel
Born	August 6, 1943 Altadena, California, USA
Died	October 16, 1998 (aged 55) Santa Monica, California, USA
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Computer science
Alma mater	UCLA
Doctoral advisor	Dave Farber
Known for	Request for Comment Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Postel's Law
Influenced	Tim Berners-Lee[1]

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^[2] 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.^[3]

Career

Postel attended Van Nuys High School,^[4] 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.

Map of the Internet, created by Jon Postel in 1982

While at UCLA, he was involved in early work on the ARPANET. He worked briefly at the MITRE Corporation, then helped set up the Network Information Center at SRI. In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.^[5] Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. He wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.

Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on its Board of Trustees. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.

All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division ("Division 7") of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.^{[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]}

DNS Root Authority test, U.S. response

Postel in 1994, with map of Internet top-level domains.

On January 28, 1998, Postel, as a test, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers on his own authority and instructed them to change the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions (NSI)'s A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET (198.41.0.4) to IANA's DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between the non-government operators with IANA and the 4 remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, DoD, and BRL with NSI. Though usage of the Internet was not interrupted, he soon received orders from senior government officials to undo this change,^{[19][20][21][22][23][24]} which he did.^[25] Within a week, the US NTIA issued A proposal to improve technical management of Internet names and addresses, including changes to authority over the Internet DNS root zone,^[26] which ultimately, and controversially,^[27] increased U.S. control.^[28]

Legacy

On October 16, 1998, Postel died of heart problems in Los Angeles,^[17] nine months after the DNS Root Authority incident.

The significance of Jon Postel's contributions to building the Internet, both technical and personal, were such that a memorial recollection of his life forms part of the core technical literature sequence of the Internet in the form of RFC 2468 "I Remember IANA", written by Vinton Cerf.

Postel's law

Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC 760, which includes a robustness principle often called Postel's law: "an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior" (reworded in RFC 1122 as "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send").

In digital circuits, this principle has long been an important aspect of what is known as the static discipline.

See also

• ARPANET
• Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing (1972 documentary w/Postel cameo)
• History of the Internet
• Jonathan B. Postel Service Award
• STD 8

Notes

1. A Ten Year Tribute to Jon Postel where Berners-Lee comments on the "society, sets of values and ways of working" as, in part, established by Postel
2. q:Jon Postel
3. 2012 Inductees, Internet Hall of Fame website. Last accessed April 24, 2012
4. Hafner, Katie; Lyon, Matthew (1996). Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster. p. 137. ISBN 0-684-81201-0. Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf had been best friends since attending Van Nuys High School in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley.... While Cerf and Crocker were academic stars, Postel, who was twenty-five, had had a more checkered academic career. He had grown up in nearby Glendale and Sherman Oaks, and he too had attended Van Nuys High School, where his grades were mediocre.
5. "USC Memorial Tribute for Jonathan B. Postel". University of Southern California. November 5, 1998. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
6. Jon Postel Home page. Information Sciences Institute, USC.
7. "Jon Postel Biography". Information Sciences Institute web site. June 5, 1997. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
8. USC/ISI Computer Networks Division ("Div 7")
9. Internet Assigned Numbers Authority web site.
10. RFC-Editor
11. Remembering Jonathan B. Postel. Postel Center.
12. In Memory of Jon Postel. Internet Society.
13. Calverley, Bob; Krieger, Dianne (Spring 1999). "Jonathan B. Postel 1943–1998". USC Trojan Family Magazine. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
14. About the Postel Award. ISOC.
15. The Postel Center
16. Los Nettos
17. 'God of the Internet' is dead. BBC, October 19, 1998.
18. In Memoriam. Domain Name Handbook.
19. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv (January 31, 1998). "Internet Reconfiguration Concerns Federal Officials". The Washington Post.
20. Gittlen, Sandra (February 4, 1998). "Taking the wrong root?". NetworkWorld.com.
21. Gittlen, Sandra (February 9, 1998). "Surprise IP address system test creates a stir". Network World.
22. Gerwig, Kate (February 9, 1998). "One Man's Attempt to Reroute Internet Traffic". InternetWeek.com.
23. Cave, Damien (July 2, 2002). "It's time for ICANN to go". Salon.com.
24. Farber, Dave (July 2, 2002). "a comment on Gilmore: ICANN Must Go (good insights)". Interesting-people mailing list.
25. Bridis, Ted (AP) (February 5, 1998). "Internet reconfiguration turns out to be rogue test". The Daily News (Kentucky).
26. "A proposal to improve technical management of Internet names and addresses. Discussion Draft 1/30/98". NTIA.org. January 30, 1998. Archived from the original on February 7, 1998.
27. Froomkin, A. Michael (2000). "Wrong turn in cyberspace: Using ICANN to route around the APA and the Constitution". University of Miami School of Law. (cited 50 Duke L. J. 17 (2000))
28. Cukier, Kenneth (February 16, 1998). "Testing times for Net guardians". Total Telecom.

External links

• postel.org Research center at USC/ISI created in his honor.