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Jonathan Bruce Postel (; 6 August 1943 ‒ 16 October 1998) made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly in the area of standards. He is principally known for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series. The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute.
Postels Law Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC 793, which includes a Robustness Principle which is often quoted as "Postel's Law": "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" (often reworded as "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you receive"). Career Postel earned a B.S. and M.S. in engineering (in 1966 and 1968 respectively), and a Ph.D. in computer science in 1974, all from UCLA. While at UCLA, he was involved in early work on the ARPANET; he later moved to the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, where he spent the rest of his career. Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his passing, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFCs 0791-0793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. He himself 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 the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. 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. Usurpation of DNS authority On January 28, 1998, Postel, on his own authority, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root servers and instructed them to change the root zone server from Network Solutions (NSI)'s A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. (198.41.0.4) to DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus splitting control of Internet naming between IANA and the four remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, the .mil server, BRL and NSI. He soon received a telephone call from Ira Magaziner, who instructed him to undo this change. Within a week, the NTIA issued its "Green Paper" asserting its definitive authority over the Internet root, eventually leading to the creation of ICANN and effectively terminating any attempts by the International Council of Registrars to claim such authority for itself. The next few years would see the most dramatic phases of the dot-com bubble. Death Postel died of complications following heart valve replacement surgery in Los Angeles, on October 16, 1998. Legacy 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. (This is no trivial thing given that between 1969 and February 2002, only 3,240 RFCs were published.) See also Obituaries/Memorials | ||||||||
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