Jon Postel Birthday

Jon Postel: The God of Netizens

A British newspaper once said that if there was a God of the internet it would’ve been Jon Postel. Jon Postel was one of the people responsible for the internet. His many achievements range from the development of the early protocols of the internet to the development and production of the TCP/IP basic internet protocols, email transfer protocols or SMTP and DNS or name server protocols. He was also one of the authors and the editor of the RFC or request for comments series that had resulted in the clean, complete, efficient, and conservative protocols that computers use to communicate with each other everyday and that had opened up the world to a whole new universe of information and sharing.

Postel: Internet’s Poster Boy
Postel had made a huge difference in the development of the Internet, and is known for having contributed the Postel’s Law. The said law is said to contain the Robustness Principle and is also credited for the formulation of internet standards. It refers to the concept of being conservative in what you send, and be liberal in what you collect or receive.

Jon Postel worked for more than 25 years on the development and management of the internet in USC School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute. He was one of the key movers in developing the internet’s predecessor, ARPAnet. Jon Postel was also one of the people who developed the original concept of breaking down information or messages into small packets or chunks, carrying this over a network and reassembling the information through the addresses that each information packet contains. This system of information transfer however needed each computer in a network to have its own unique address so Postel developed the concept of the www and dot system.

As the internet developed and more and more computers joined the network, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) was formed to manage the address system. The IANA is the organization that keeps track of all the existing networks, names, addresses, and protocols of the internet. IANA basically became the traffic control, monitoring and management system of all the computers all over the world. This was headed by none other than Jon Postel.

Jon did not become a millionaire because of his contributions to society, far from it; he maintained his simplicity, eccentric attire and long bushy beard all throughout his career. Instead, Jon Postel devoted his entire life into developing a free, workable and efficient portal for information sharing and social interaction that can be used by businesses, the academe, society and the government.

Postel’s Legacy
Jonathan Bruce Postel was born on August 6, 1943 and passed away on October 16, 1998 due to complications from his heart surgery. In his relatively short lifespan of 55 years, he has managed to breathe life into what we call the cyberspace today. Months before his death, he was given the International Telecommunication Union’s silver medal for his exceptional contributions. He is being commemorated in various ways such as giving awards in his name such as the Internet Society’s Postel Award.