Jon Postel
Jon Postel
Jonathan Bruce Postelwas 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 Commentdocument series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authorityuntil his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth6 August 1943
CountryUnited States of America
In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.
TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
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.
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.
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.
The overriding rule, if you want to run a domain, is to be fair.
Being in the limelight has its minuses.
There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational.
The world wide web has really been quite spectacular and not something I would have predicted.
Group discussion is very valuable; group drafting is less productive.
All this stuff was done via FTP but the web has put a really nice user interface on it.
I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet. But at the end, that article wasn't very complimentary, because the author suggested that I wasn't doing a very good job, and that I ought to be replaced by a "professional."Of course, there isn't any "God of the Internet." The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.
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.
Everyone should have ten megabits and then the web will be a wonderful thing.