Residence United States Alma mater UCLA Name Jon Postel | Nationality American Doctoral advisor Dave Farber Role Computer scientist Fields Computer Science | |
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Born August 6, 1943 ( 1943-08-06 ) Known for Request for CommentInternet Assigned Numbers AuthorityPostel's Law Education University of California, Los Angeles (1974) Similar People Vint Cerf, Robert E Kahn, David J Farber, Joi Ito | ||
Andrew yao jon postel lecture 5 5 15
Jonathan Bruce Postel (/pəˈstel/; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium.
Contents
- Andrew yao jon postel lecture 5 5 15
- Jon postel internet hall of fame pioneer posthumous recipient
- Career
- DNS Root Authority test US response
- Legacy
- Postels law
- References
The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.
Jon postel internet hall of fame pioneer posthumous recipient
Career
Postel attended Van Nuys High School, and then UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.A. (1968) in Engineering. He then went on to complete his Ph.D. there in Computer Science in 1974, with Dave Farber as his thesis advisor.
While at UCLA, he was involved in early work on the ARPANET. He worked briefly at the MITRE Corporation, then helped set up the Network Information Center at SRI. In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. He wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.
Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on its Board of Trustees. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.
All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division ("Division 7") of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
DNS Root Authority test, U.S. response
On January 28, 1998, Postel, as a test, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers on his own authority and instructed them to change the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions (NSI)'s A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET (198.41.0.4) to IANA's DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus dividing control of Internet naming between the non-government operators with IANA and the 4 remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, DoD, and BRL with NSI. Though usage of the Internet was not interrupted, he soon received orders from senior government officials to undo this change, which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued A proposal to improve technical management of Internet names and addresses, including changes to authority over the Internet DNS root zone, which ultimately, and controversially, increased U.S. control.
Legacy
On October 16, 1998, Postel died of heart problems in Los Angeles, nine months after the DNS Root Authority incident.
The significance of Jon Postel's contributions to building the Internet, both technical and personal, were such that a memorial recollection of his life forms part of the core technical literature sequence of the Internet in the form of RFC 2468 "I Remember IANA", written by Vinton Cerf.
Postel's law
Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC 760, which includes a robustness principle often called Postel's law: "an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior" (reworded in RFC 1122 as "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send").
In digital circuits, this principle has long been an important aspect of what is known as the static discipline.