it's been 24 years, and we still live in his shadow and stand on his
shoulders. we try not to stand on his toes.
randy
it’s been 24 years, and we still live in his shadow and stand on his
shoulders. we try not to stand on his toes.
“A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there.” Jon Postel
randy
./noah
my favorite is
It's perfectly appropriate to be upset. I thought of it in a slightly
different way--like a space that we were exploring and, in the early days,
we figured out this consistent path through the space: IP, TCP, and so on.
What's been happening over the last few years is that the IETF is filling
the rest of the space with every alternative approach, not necessarily any
better. Every possible alternative is now being written down. And it's not
useful. -- Jon Postel
I wish I'd met him. I know I would have liked him a lot. We wear the
same sandals.
I got on the "interwebs" just before Al Gore invented the internet (no
political statement, just that is the way it was back then.) 15 3.5"
floppy disks, a 33Mhz 486, slackware, (and a really reliable USRobotics
modem.)
I found this thing called "RFC"... and Jim Postel was a man I really
wanted to meet.
Thanks, Randy, for reminding me of the shoulders I stand on.
About the same time for me, may have been a 286. I remember fiddling with init strings and Trumpet Winsock.
It wasn't really the interWEBs then. The web was a small part of the experience for me. USENET, email, FTP, Archie, gopher with a splash of www for flavor.
Early unix had a similar philosophical debate. Everything is a simple
file (including most devices), make commands which do one thing and do
it well so they can be connected together in new ways (an almost
prescient view on the ubiquity of multi-cpu/core systems), when in
doubt generalize and let the user specialize for their needs, don't
try to guess everything your program will be used for.
Then we got: POP-QUIZ! Name which letters a-z which aren't options to
ls?
Granted computing was more data processing than UI back then, but even
desktop apps like word processing had this style (e.g., a separate
program to format math equations or tables which could be piped into
from the general word processing program in a pipeline, and another to
do final formatting for the printing device.)
Early unix had a similar philosophical debate. Everything is a simple
file (including most devices), make commands which do one thing and
do it well so they can be connected together in new ways (an almost
prescient view on the ubiquity of multi-cpu/core systems), when in
doubt generalize and let the user specialize for their needs, don't
try to guess everything your program will be used for.
Oh. you mean SaaS? or WebSockets? or REST? or 
I remember an old guy I worked with. We were decommissioning our
Prime for this new thing called "Novell 286"
He said "The computer industry is like the car industry in the 50's.
We add more grille, more fenders, more wings. But it is still a car."
One of the best things about this list is first hand accounts of our internet lore
Does anyone have any stories about working with or near John they would like to share with the list? It would definitely make my day to hear more about the early internet
Thanks,
Dan
Does anyone have any stories about working with or near John they
would like to share with the list? It would definitely make my day
to hear more about the early internet
somewhere around i have a protocol violation ticket he issued.
A good book on the topic of the early internet is “Where Wizards Stay Up Late” by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. A large part of the book covers happenings at Bolt Beranek and Newman, and there are plenty of mentions of Jon Postel.
Joseph
+1
The only thing I have to criticize is that the book has way too few pages.
RFC 2468 is brief but captures the both pleasure of working with Jon and his selfless spirit
in pursuit of a better Internet.
/John
+1 (with an extremely large value of one)
I have (re)read Where Wizards Stay Up Late /and/ recommended it to many people many different times.
In my not so humble opinion, Where Wizards Stay Up Late should be required reading for anyone wanting to learn about the history / development of the ARPAnet and the Internet.
That said, it would be a worthwhile project to collect the places in which this source can be supplemented with additional information (a.k.a. grains of salt).
Grüße, Carsten
Agreed.
I believe there is much discussion to this effect on the Internet History mailing list.
Link - Internet-history Info Page
- Internet-history Info Page
That book needs a sequel.
+10 on the internet history mailing list also.
Jon Postel participated in many online forums such as the tcp-ip mailing list. To access them, I’ve been using the archives at ban.ai, but I can’t access them currently. They’re also available via Google Groups, but unfortunately there’s a lot of spam there. You could also visit the IETF mailing list archives that go back to 1992.
—gregbo
Fixed:
Where Wizards Stay Up Late should be
required reading for anyone wanting to learn about the history /
development of the ARPAnet and the Internet.
Dave Taht wrote:
That book needs a sequel.
+10 on the internet history mailing list also.
Assuming you're referring to "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" ...
You might check out xbbn.org - which redirects to http://exbbn.weebly.com/ - lots of collected personal recollections from the old days.
It links to a variety of things, including: A Culture of Innovation - xBBN - which is essentially oral history, through 2010, that extends a lot of the stuff in the book. There's an associated web site at https://walden-family.com/bbn/ - Dave is basically our historian - and https://walden-family.com/ has some more stuff of broader historic interest.
Miles Fidelman, BBN 1985-1992