To: ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com From: Dave Farber Subject: IP: Remembrance/postel Reply-To: farber@cis.upenn.edu I, and others I fear, have spent a sleepless night after hearing of the death of Jon Postel last night. This morning there was a note in my mail box from Vint Cerf that said many of the things I feel at this time. I asked him for permission to send on which he granted. I also remember Jon. I was his primary thesis advisor along with Jerry Estrin and I remember with fond memories the months spent closely working with Jon while his eager mind developed the ideas in back of what was a pioneering thesis that founded the area of protocol verification. Since I was at UC Irvine and Jon at UCLA we used to meet in the morning prior to my ride to UCI at a Pancake House in Santa Monica for breakfast and the hard work of developing a thesis. I gained a great respect for Jon then and 10 pounds of weight. I will miss him greatly. Jon was my second Ph.D. student. The first, Philip Merlin, also died way before his time. Dave ________________________________________________________________________ October 17, 1998 I REMEMBER IANA Vint Cerf A long time ago, in a network, far far away, a great adventure took place. Out of the chaos of new ideas for communication, the experiments, the tentative designs, and crucible of testing, there emerged a cornucopia of networks. Beginning with the ARPANET, an endless stream of networks evolved, and ultimately were interlinked to become the Internet. Someone had to keep track of all the protocols, the identifiers, networks and addresses and ultimately the names of all the things in the networked universe. And someone had to keep track of all the information that erupted with volcanic force from the intensity of the debates and discussions and endless invention that has continued unabated for 30 years. That someone was Jonathan B. Postel, our Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, friend, engineer, confidant, leader, icon, and now, first of the giants to depart from our midst. Jon, our beloved IANA, is gone. Even as I write these words I cannot quite grasp this stark fact. We had almost lost him once before in 1991. Surely we knew he was at risk as are we all. But he had been our rock, the foundation on which our every web search and email was built, always there to mediate the random dispute, to remind us when our documentation did not do justice to its subject, to make difficult decisions with apparent ease, and to consult when careful consideration was needed. We will survive our loss and we will remember. He has left a monumental legacy for all Internauts to contemplate. Steadfast service for decades, moving when others seemed paralyzed, always finding the right course in a complex minefield of technical and sometimes political obstacles. Jon and I went to the same high school, Van Nuys High, in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. But we were in different classes and I really didn't know him then. Our real meeting came at UCLA when we became a part of a group of graduate students working for Prof. Leonard Kleinrock on the ARPANET project. Steve Crocker was another of the Van Nuys crowd who was part of the team and led the development of the first host-host protocols for the ARPANET. When Steve invented the idea of the Request for Comments series, Jon became the instant editor. When we needed to keep track of all the hosts and protocol identifiers, Jon volunteered to be the Numbers Czar and later the IANA once the Internet was in place. Jon was a founding member of the Internet Architecture Board and served continuously from its founding to the present. He was the FIRST individual member of the Internet Society I know, because he and Steve Wolff raced to see who could fill out the application forms and make payment first and Jon won. He served as a trustee of the Internet Society. He was the custodian of the .US domain, a founder of the Los Nettos Internet service, and, by the way, managed the networking research division of USC Information Sciences Institute. Jon loved the outdoors. I know he used to enjoy backpacking in the high Sierras around Yosemite. Bearded and sandaled, Jon was our resident hippie-patriarch at UCLA. He was a private person but fully capable of engaging photon torpedoes and going to battle stations in a good engineering argument. And he could be stubborn beyond all expectation. He could have outwaited the Sphinx in a staring contest, I think. Jon inspired loyalty and steadfast devotion among his friends and his colleagues. For me, he personified the words 'selfless service.' For nearly 30 years, Jon has served us all, taken little in return, indeed sometimes receiving abuse when he should have received our deepest appreciation. It was particularly gratifying at the last Internet Society meeting in Geneva to see Jon receive the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union. It is an award generally reserved for Heads of State but I can think of no one more deserving of global recognition for his contributions. While it seems almost impossible to avoid feeling an enormous sense of loss, as if a yawning gap in our networked universe had opened up and swallowed our friend, I must tell you that I am comforted as I contemplate what Jon has wrought. He leaves a legacy of edited documents that tell our collective Internet story, including not only the technical but also the poetic and whimsical as well. He completed the incorporation of a successor to his service as IANA and leaves a lasting legacy of service to the community in that role. His memory is rich and vibrant and will not fade from our collective consciousness. 'What would Jon have done?' we will think, as we wrestle in the days ahead with the problems Jon kept so well tamed for so many years. There will almost surely be many memorials to Jon's monumental service to the Internet Community. As current chairman of the Internet Society, I pledge to establish an award in Jon's name to recognize long-standing service to the community, the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award, which is awarded to Jon posthumously as its first recipient. If Jon were here, I am sure he would urge us not to mourn his passing but to celebrate his life and his contributions. He would remind us that there is still much work to be done and that we now have the responsibility and the opportunity to do our part. I doubt that anyone could possibly duplicate his record, but it stands as a measure of one man's astonishing contribution to a community he knew and loved. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 17:55:30 -0700 To: ietf@ietf.org From: braden@ISI.EDU Subject: Jon Postel I have had the great privilege of knowing Jon Postel as a collegue and as a friend since the early ARPANET day, about 1970. I have sat countless hours in countless meeting rooms with him, as the ARPANET grew, became the Internet, and grew again. I know well how much of himself Jon put into the ARPANET and (especially) the Internet, and what a great debt we owe to his intelligence and wisdom. Jon lavished quiet but passionate dedication on the Internet. He hated it when people said or did stupid or destructive things. And yet he carried a gentle sense of humor and a sense of proportion. What series of documents do you know, besides the RFCs, that include delightful surprises every April 1? There are many aspects of the IETF culture that matched Jon very well. Dedication to making things that work, a never-ending attempt to keep protocols as simple and powerful as possible, and a slight counter- cultural tinge -- all characterized Jon. Our best memorial to Jon will be to try harder to produce protocols of the highest standards, and to document them clearly and with grace. It was easy to overlook or underestimate Jon's contribution. He did not give riveting speeches; none of his phrases made it onto T shirts. Lots and lots of very bright people contributed ideas and words to the Internet protocol suite, but it was Jon Postel who spun out the final words that define the Internet. As far as I know, Jon had no model to follow when he wrote RFCs 791, 792, and 793, yet the result was a model that I personally have spent nearly 20 years studying and trying to emulate. And Jon's contrubution was not just the skill and grace of his editorial style; in writing these documents, Jon determined much of the detailed content, interpeting and elaborating the ideas of others to produce one seamless whole. A well known "sage" has recently talked about the cult of Jon and about his arrogance and his eliteism. Well, yes, there was a cult of Jon, in the sense that Jon earned the respect and admiration of many people. And he was a bit elitist, but only in the sense of trying to develop, preserve, and promost the best ideas. But arrogance is so far from Jon's personality that the claim is ludicrous. For many years during the infancy of the Internet, his compatriots in the early Internet days admiringly dubbed Jon the Protocol Czar, with sub-title: Unfailing Arbiter of Good Taste in protocols. The Internet was able to grow lustily for many years with a minimum of engineering bastardization (entropy growth); we owe much of that to Jon's constant attention to good sense and detail. He used his position as RFC Editor and IANA to unflinchingly intervene to keep a modicum of good engineering sense in the Internet architecture. Jon was a roomful of wise and active committees, all rolled up in one. Jon's untimely passing is a tragedy for all of us who have had the privilege of knowing and working with him. We will miss him. Bob Braden PS: I send this message using Jon's protocol SMTP, to a domain name that follows a system he designed, using protocols that he helped to design and that he documented.