Jon Postel | |
|---|---|
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| Born | (1943-08-06)August 6, 1943 Altadena, California, U.S. |
| Died | October 16, 1998(1998-10-16) (aged 55) Santa Monica, California, U.S. |
| Education | University of California, Los Angeles (BS,MS,PhD) |
| Known for | Request for Comment Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Postel's Law |
| Awards | Internet Hall of Fame Pioneer, Posthumous Recipient (2012), ACMSIGCOMM Award (1997),[1] ITU Silver Medal (1998),[2] ISOC Jonathan B. Postel Service Award (1999, posthumous)[3] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Doctoral advisor | Dave Farber |
Jonathan Bruce Postel (/pəˈstɛl/; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an Americancomputer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of theInternet, particularly with respect tostandards. He is known principally for being the Editor of theRequest for Comment (RFC) document series, forSimple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering theInternet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death.
During his lifetime he was referred to as the "god of the Internet"[4][5] for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this "compliment" came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a "professional," and responded with typical self-effacing matter-of-factness: "Of course, there isn’t any 'God of the Internet.' The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together."[6]
Postel attendedVan Nuys High School,[7] and thenUCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.S. (1968) in Engineering. There he completed his Ph.D. in computer science in 1974, withDave Farber as his thesis advisor.
Postel started work at UCLA on 23 December 1969 as a Postgraduate Research Engineer (I) where he was involved in early work on theARPANET. He was involved in the development of the Internet domain system and, at his instigation,Vint Cerf andBob Kahn developed a second set of protocols for handling data between networks, which is now known asInternet protocol suite.[8] Together with Cerf andSteve Crocker, Postel worked on implementing most of the ARPANET protocols.[9] Cerf would later become one of the principal designers of the TCP/IP standard,[9] which works because of the sentence known asPostel's Law.[10]
Postel worked with ARPANET until 24 August 1973 when he left to joinMITRE Corporation. He assisted withNetwork Information Center, which was being set up atSRI byElizabeth Feinler. In March 1977, he joined theInformation Sciences Institute at theUniversity of Southern California as a research scientist.[11]
Postel was theRFC 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 theInternet protocol suite, and RFC 2223,Instructions to RFC Authors. Between 1982 and 1984 Postel co-authored the RFCs which became the foundation of today'sDNS (RFC 819, RFC 881, RFC 882 and RFC 920) which were joined in 1995 by RFC 1591 which he also co-wrote. In total, he wrote or co-authored more than 20 RFCs.[12]
Postel served on theInternet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, theInternet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of theInternet Society, and was on its Board of Trustees. He was the original and long-time.usTop-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.[13]
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On January 28, 1998, Postel, as a test, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regionalroot nameservers on his own authority and instructed them to reconfigure their servers,[14] changing the root zone server from thenSAIC subsidiaryNetwork Solutions' 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 atNASA,DoD, andBRL with NSI. Though usage of the Internet was not interrupted, Postel was threatened by US Presidential science advisorIra Magaziner with the statement "You'll never work on the Internet again" and was ordered to end the test,[15] which he did.[16] Within a week, the USNTIA issuedA proposal to improve technical management of Internet names and addresses, including changes to authority over the InternetDNS root zone,[17] which ultimately, and controversially,[18] increased U.S. control.[19]
On October 16, 1998, Postel died of complications fromheart surgery in Los Angeles. He was recovering from asurgery to replace a leaking heart valve.[20]
The significance of Jon Postel's contributions to building the Internet, both technical and personal, were such that a memorial recollection of his life and his work forms part of the core technical literature sequence of the Internet in the form of RFC 2468 – "I Remember IANA,"[21] , written byVint Cerf.
The Postel Center atInformation Sciences Institute,University of Southern California, is named in his honor, as is the annual Postel Award. In 2012, Postel was inducted into theInternet Hall of Fame.[22] The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.[23][24]
Another tribute,RFC 2441 – "'Working with Jon' Tribute delivered at UCLA, October 30, 1998,"[25] , was written byDanny Cohen.
Perhaps his most famous legacy is fromRFC 760[26], which includes arobustness principle often calledPostel's law: "an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior" (reworded inRFC 1122[27] as: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.").
TheJonathan B. Postel Service Award is an award named after Postel. The award has been presented most years since 1999 by theInternet Society to "honor a person who has made outstanding contributions in service to the data communications community." The first recipient of the award was Postel himself, posthumously.[28] The award was created byVint Cerf as chairman of theInternet Society and announced in"I rememberIANA"[21]
God, at least in the West, is often represented as a man with a flowing beard and sandals... if the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel, a man who matches that description to a T. Mr. Postel's claim to cyber-divinity, besides his appearance, is that he is the chairman and, in effect, the sole member of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the organization that coordinates almost all Internet addresses.
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.
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