a moment of silence

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1

Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 13:04:10 -0500 (CDT)
From: Joe Shaw <jshaw@insync.net>
Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu

He was the author of many RFC's on how to make the Internet a better
place.

It's obvious that we need to educate lots of folks on where the
Internet came from. Too many people don't know who Jon was and what
his impact on the net was.

To say the least, Jon did a LOT more than write RFCs, though he did
lots of that, too.

Jon was one of the folks who was there at the birth of the Internet.
If he was not a "father of the Internet", he was certainly one of its
earliest tutors.

Among other things, Jon was the keeper of RFCs and Internet numbers.
If you had a new protocol or record type or anything else that needed
a unique identifier, Jon was who you needed to talk to. He was the
founder of the Internet Address and Naming Authority (IANA) and he did
the top-level allocation of IP addresses and domain names.

He (along with the indefatigable Joyce Reynolds) edited and assigned
numbers to RFCs. And, since these functions did not exist before the
start of the Internet, he invented the whole thing from scratch.

I don't have the time to go over all of Jon's contributions to the
Internet and am certainly not aware of all of them, but I feel very
safe in saying that without Jon the Internet would be a very different
"place" today...and I as good a place, either.

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634

2

Thu, 14 Oct 1999, Kevin Oberman wrote:

> Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 13:04:10 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Joe Shaw <jshaw@insync.net>
> Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu
>
> He was the author of many RFC's on how to make the Internet a better
> place.

It's obvious that we need to educate lots of folks on where the
Internet came from. Too many people don't know who Jon was and what
his impact on the net was.

goto a couple of spam houses and send info educating *everyone* about
Postel... Could that use of spam be considered ironic? :wink:

scott

3

If he was not a "father of the Internet", he was certainly one of its

I thought that was Al Gore!! :slight_smile:

But I digress, now back to our regularly scheduled backhoe induced
cable outage announcements.

4

On this point, is anyone actively writing either a biography of Jon or
of the "real" story of the Internet? By real, I personally mean
without the self-congratulating summaries, like those of certain (now
marketing) folk, of how visionary they were in the early days.

This would not likely work by committee...

Regards,

5

On this point, is anyone actively writing either a biography of Jon or
of the "real" story of the Internet? By real, I personally mean
without the self-congratulating summaries, like those of certain (now
marketing) folk, of how visionary they were in the early days.

There is a nice book that is very readable by the public at large
on this topic. I don't claim that it is complete and covers everything,
but it does okay:

Where Wizards Stay Up Late
by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon