Jon Postel Quotes

• Years ago when you’d go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now most of the people are from companies who are building internet products and care what the standards turn out to be.

  Jon Postel

• There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational.

  Jon Postel

• 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.

  Jon Postel

• The world wide web has really been quite spectacular and not something I would have predicted.

  Jon Postel

• 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.

  Jon Postel

• The overriding rule, if you want to run a domain, is to be fair.

  Jon Postel

• The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.

  Jon Postel

• 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.

  Jon Postel

• TCP works very hard to get the data delivered in order without errors and does retransmissions and recoveries and all that kind of stuff which is exactly what you want in a file transfer because so you don’t want any errors in your file.

  Jon Postel

• One way to get high speed to the home is over cable systems.

  Jon Postel

• 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.

  Jon Postel

• In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

  Jon Postel

• 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.

  Jon Postel

• I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet.

  Jon Postel

• 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.

  Jon Postel

• I got involved when I was a graduate student at UCLA when UCLA was the first site on the net.

  Jon Postel

• 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.

  Jon Postel

• Group discussion is very valuable; group drafting is less productive.

  Jon Postel

• Everyone should have ten megabits and then the web will be a wonderful thing.

  Jon Postel

• 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.

  Jon Postel

Jon Postel (27)

Birth:	6th August, 1943
Death:	16th October, 1998
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Computer Scientist

About

Jonathan Bruce Postel was born in Altadena, California, USA. He was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He earned a BS degree in Computer Science in 1966 and an MS degree in Computer Science in 1968 both from the University of California at Los Angeles. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1974. In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death. The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California.

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