21 Jon Postel Quotes

Jon Postel quotes

1. A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there.

2. In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.

3. TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

4. 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.

5. Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

6. He worked quietly for years as keeper of the RFCs and final arbiter in technical matters when consensus couldn't be reached. Postel believed that decisions he had made in the course of his work over the years had been for the good of the community and that starting a company to profit from those activities would have amounted to a violation of public trust.

7. God, at least in the West, is often represented as a man with a flowing beard and sandals... if the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel, a man who matches that description to a T. Mr. Postel's claim to cyber-divinity, besides his appearance, is that he is the chairman and, in effect, the sole member of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the organization that coordinates almost all Internet addresses.

1. Being in the limelight has its minuses.

2. But I do have a computer at home and a pretty good ISDN connection.

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

4. Be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.

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

6. All this stuff was done via FTP but the web has put a really nice user interface on it.

7. But as soon as we got that higher speed access to the home there?s going to be a tremendous crunch on the backbones for a much higher speed bandwidth. People really ought to be planning for that.

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

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

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

14. 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.