Jon Postel (1943 – 1998)
American computer scientist.
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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.
TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.
Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
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.
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.
A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there.
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