Internet mourns loss of founding father Jon Postel

By Sandra Gittlen
Network World Fusion, 10/19/98

Internet guru Jon Postel died Friday, leaving many to look past recent disputes over the assignment of Internet addresses and dwell on the great advances he made for the Internet as a whole.

Postel, one of the fathers of the Internet, succumbed to a heart condition at the age of 55.

Postel was head of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which currently doles out IP names and numbers. He was in the middle of negotiations with the government on how to hand over IANA's duties to a nonprofit corporation.

Today, the Internet is using the protocol he helped to create, IP, to mourn his loss: The Domain Name Handbook Web site has been turned black; portions of Walt Whitman's poem "O Captain! My Captain!" are arriving in Internet e-mailboxes across the globe, and hundreds of colleagues and friends are reaching out to comfort each other via videoconferencing, e-mail and telephony.

Postel held many titles during his more than three decades of involvement with the Internet: IANA leader, a director at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, holder of the .us domain, member of the Internet Society, the list goes on.

But what many of his colleagues have documented as this researcher's greatest achievement was his ability to edit the documents that have become the basis for the Internet: the requests for comments (RFC).

Back in the mid-1970s, during his days working on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, Postel pored over the documents that detailed protocols such as TCP and IP. He developed a clear, concise template for which future standards would be presented, and he edited each protocol to match that style, creating a unified set of documents.

"He created and maintained the standards," said Tony Rutkowski, a lawyer and former head of the Internet Society. "He also scrutinized and added to them. He was a wise elder who added to dialogue about what was going on."

"He has looked at every word of every document," said his Information Sciences Institute colleague Bob Braden. "He catches inconsistencies that no one else has caught."

"I call him "the clerk of the Internet,'" said Brian Carpenter, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force's Internet Architecture Board. "But he gave scientific and engineering input to what were essentially clerical jobs. He could make significant contributions to protocol designs because he had the breadth of knowledge."

Fred Baker, chair of the IETF, said Postel had a very early recognition of problems that scaling could cause. "He recognized the need to use hierarchies on the Internet," Baker said. "He also had an eye for elegance that offered simple solutions to complex problems."

But in recent years, Postel's attention had turned to the task of helping the government to create IANA's successor - the nonprofit corporation. Postel had been doing the job since 1970 and became the official head of IANA, through government funding, in 1988.

This Herculean effort brought him within the direct shot of his critics and the media. A test he performed to see if management of the root servers that control domain name updates around the world could be transferred caused an uproar, forcing the U.S. government to step in. The Clinton administration told Postel to advise them of any further "tests." Postel, himself, had said that he didn't understand why everyone was attacking him. But the answer was simple: Suddenly the Internet was a viable commercial interest and it would be overlooked as such. There was no longer room for one person to make decisions that would affect the whole Internet.

He worked closely with the Clinton administration to develop a plan for the government's exit from the process and wrote several incarnations of the proposed company's bylaws.

"It was unfortunate that issues of putting IANA on a firm international foundation were not settled yet," Braden said.

In fact, the new corporation was weeks from being unveiled by the Clinton's Internet advisor Ira Magaziner. Magaziner was not available for comment on changes in these plans.

But even his critics and colleagues alike say that Postel's attention to detail and creating a structure will help the Internet to go on without a glitch.

"Jon isn't going to be here to throw things back at us for revision," Baker said. "But maybe it's time we did that for ourselves anyway... He did what he did so well that the Internet operationally won't feel his loss," Baker said. "It's the person that we'll miss."