Interesting People mailing list archives

IP: Remembrance/postel


From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 07:28:40 -0400



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.


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