October 17, 1998
I REMEMBER IANA
Vint Cerf
A long time ago, in
a network, far far away, a great adventure took place.
Out of the chaos of
new ideas for communication, the experiments, the tentative designs, and
crucible of testing, there emerged a cornucopia of networks. Beginning
with the ARPANET, an endless stream of networks evolved, and ultimately
were interlinked to become the Internet. Someone had to keep track of
all the protocols, the identifiers, networks and addresses and ultimately
the names of all the things in the networked universe. And someone had
to keep track of all the information that erupted with volcanic force
from the intensity of the debates and discussions and endless invention
that has continued unabated for 30 years. That someone was Jonathan B.
Postel, our Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, friend, engineer, confidant,
leader, icon, and now, first of the giants to depart from our midst.
Jon, our beloved IANA,
is gone. Even as I write these words I cannot quite grasp this stark fact.
We had almost lost him once before in 1991. Surely we knew he was at risk
as are we all. But he had been our rock, the foundation on which our every
web search and email was built, always there to mediate the random dispute,
to remind us when our documentation did not do justice to its subject,
to make difficult decisions with apparent ease, and to consult when careful
consideration was needed. We will survive our loss and we will remember.
He has left a monumental legacy for all Internauts to contemplate. Steadfast
service for decades, moving when others seemed paralyzed, always finding
the right course in a complex minefield of technical and sometimes political
obstacles.
Jon and I went to
the same high school, Van Nuys High, in the San Fernando Valley north
of Los Angeles. But we were in different classes and I really didn’t know
him then. Our real meeting came at UCLA when we became a part of a group
of graduate students working for Prof. Leonard Kleinrock on the ARPANET
project. Steve Crocker was another of the Van Nuys crowd who was part
of the team and led the development of the first host-host protocols for
the ARPANET. When Steve invented the idea of the Request for Comments
series, Jon became the instant editor. When we needed to keep track of
all the hosts and protocol identifiers, Jon volunteered to be the Numbers
Czar and later the IANA once the Internet was in place.
Jon was a founding
member of the Internet Architecture Board and served continuously from
its founding to the present. He was the FIRST individual member of the
Internet Society I know, because he and Steve Wolff raced to see who could
fill out the application forms and make payment first and Jon won. He
served as a trustee of the Internet Society. He was the custodian of the
.US domain, a founder of the Los Nettos Internet service, and, by the
way, managed the networking research division of USC Information Sciences
Institute.
Jon loved the outdoors.
I know he used to enjoy backpacking in the high Sierras around Yosemite.
Bearded and sandaled, Jon was our resident hippie-patriarch at UCLA. He
was a private person but fully capable of engaging photon torpedoes and
going to battle stations in a good engineering argument. And he could
be stubborn beyond all expectation. He could have outwaited the Sphinx
in a staring contest, I think.
Jon inspired loyalty
and steadfast devotion among his friends and his colleagues. For me, he
personified the words “selfless service.” For nearly 30 years, Jon has
served us all, taken little in return, indeed sometimes receiving abuse
when he should have received our deepest appreciation. It was particularly
gratifying at the last Internet Society meeting in Geneva to see Jon receive
the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union. It is
an award generally reserved for Heads of State but I can think of no one
more deserving of global recognition for his contributions.
While it seems almost
impossible to avoid feeling an enormous sense of loss, as if a yawning
gap in our networked universe had opened up and swallowed our friend,
I must tell you that I am comforted as I contemplate what Jon has wrought.
He leaves a legacy of edited documents that tell our collective Internet
story, including not only the technical but also the poetic and whimsical
as well. He completed the incorporation of a successor to his service
as IANA and leaves a lasting legacy of service to the community in that
role. His memory is rich and vibrant and will not fade from our collective
consciousness. “What would Jon have done?” we will think, as we wrestle
in the days ahead with the problems Jon kept so well tamed for so many
years.
There will almost
surely be many memorials to Jon’s monumental service to the Internet Community.
As current chairman of the Internet Society, I pledge to establish an
award in Jon’s name to recognize long-standing service to the community,
the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award, which is awarded to Jon posthumously
as its first recipient.
If Jon were here,
I am sure he would urge us not to mourn his passing but to celebrate his
life and his contributions. He would remind us that there is still much
work to be done and that we now have the responsibility and the opportunity
to do our part. I doubt that anyone could possibly duplicate his record,
but it stands as a measure of one man’s astonishing contribution to a
community he knew and loved.
October 18, 1998
A Malaysian Journal: Changing the world quietly
Dave Crocker
[ © Copyright 1998, D. Crocker, Brandenburg Consulting ]
[ A series of notes on living and working in Malaysia, during Jackie's ]
[ Fulbright Fellowship to Universiti Putra Malaysia, near Kuala Lumpur.
]
[ Copies may be freely distributed, but must retain this preamble. ]
More than anything,
these notes concern lessons in perspective this year. I've just had an
unexpected and upsetting one and hope you will not mind my exploring it
with you:
Jackie and I are visiting
Sarawak this weekend. It is the southern of the two Malaysian states on
the island of Borneo. A little over one year ago, we visited the northern
state, Sabah, and I was confronted with the reality of an undeniably changed
world. In the U.S., we still think of Borneo in terms of head hunters
in the jungles. Indeed, Jackie works with a professor from the Iban tribe
in Borneo and he says that his great-grandfather did hunt heads, as did
all of the warriors in those days. In fact you could not get married unless
you had some heads to show as proof of your bravery.
However what we see
now and saw a year ago, are modern towns with the usual conveniences.
More astonishing, to me, was that the conveniences included a "cybercafe"
for Internet access. The fact of global access, reaching all the way to
the "wilds" of Borneo, brought home to me, last year, just how
profound the effect of the Internet is. I was reminded of that fact again,
here in Sarawack, when I received news of the death of one of the Internet's
true pioneers, Jon Postel.
Few of us get to participate
in activities that really do change the world. Fewer still can be counted
as principal contributors. For the Internet, a fair number of people have
been put forward as pioneers, some deserving of the label and some not.
All of the ones being touted enjoy the limelight. Jon was a notable exception.
He only reached the public eye recently and he never sought or enjoyed
it. For twenty-five years, he worked to help the community rather than
garner recognition. Most of his effort was in doing administrative "scut"
work, things that no one else was interested in, but that needed doing.
So he administered the technical publications series, he administered
assignment of registration values for technical protocols, he administered
assignment of Internet addresses and Internet names, and he administered
operation of the servers that map names to addresses.
There is no glory
in doing administration and operations. Quite the opposite. People notice
when it is done badly but rarely offer praise when it is done well. People
in administrative positions often become petty bureaucrats. Since there
is so little reward in the job, they artificially make it a base of power.
So it has confused some who heard Jon referred to as the Internet numbers
"czar". They did not realize that the community imparted the title to
Jon out of affection and deep appreciation for his having brought order
to essential infrastructure services. In particular the community used
that term in full knowledge that Jon took his position as a trust, rather
than as an opportunity for personal power. We always knew that his views
came from legitimate beliefs and we never had to worry that he was somehow
considering political or personal advantage. We might not agree with him,
but we always knew was driven first by a concern that the right thing
be done.
All this might give
you the wrong idea about Jon. I was not a close friend, so I cannot claim
to have known him well, only long. But he was entirely human. I certainly
knew him well enough to find him a pain to deal with, sometimes, just
like anyone else.
To qualify for responsibility
over an infrastructure service, one must be conservative. Every change
is a danger to the stability of operation, so every change must be resisted.
Jon suited that requirement far better than some of us would have liked.
In response to most suggestions for change, Jon's first response was "no".
It took me many years to learn to put an idea before him and then walk
away, rather than to press the arguments in favor. If I pressed, he entrenched
against. If, instead, I walked away, he always thought the issues through
carefully and responded constructively. For those of us who think that
at any moment we know Ultimate Truth, it is frustrating to have to deal
with someone who approaches things more carefully. Frustrating, but very
helpful.
Jon was part of the
student mafia that formed the original Computer Science department at
UCLA. He went to Van Nuys high school, in the San Fernando Valley of Los
Angeles, with my brother, Vint Cerf, and a number of others who formed
that first team of students in the new field, at UCLA. It is easy to think
about the professors who create an academic department, but it is also
easy to forget the role of the first students. In these heady days of
the sixties, this crew happened into the beginnings of a research project
investigating shared access to long-distance data communication, designed
to be robust against failure. They were inventing the Arpanet, which became
the Internet. What they did not realize was that they were also inventing
a culture.
I was hired onto that
project in 1972, just in time for the first public demonstration of the
Arpanet in Washington, D.C. The technology had been under development
and testing for 3 years and it was starting to move into an operational
phase, although an experiment of network behavior would often crash the
entire, international system. There were a number of teams involved around
the country. Officially the team at UCLA was the "Network Measurement
Center" since the principal investigator was a leader in queuing theory
and one of the research goals in creating the Arpanet tested was to measure
the behavior that the queuing theory work had predicted. Jon, Vint, and
others did participate in that work, but they served a role which I believe
was more important in the long run: They led efforts to develop uses for
the net, and they created the foundation for an approach to that development.
I had dropped out
of college and this was my first full-time job. My brother had introduced
me to computers ten years earlier, but I had limited experience and no
formal training. This is not a particularly good background for someone
joining a high-powered research project funded by the high-flying Advanced
Research Projects Agency. Yet these folks never acted condescending or
dismissive. Quite the contrary they were always open to any efforts to
help. It was the perfect opportunity for real learning and contribution
and I watched it repeated with many others who joined the team over the
next four years.
Jon had the dubious
privilege of getting me as an office mate. One day I noticed a think-piece
that has been distributed by a graduate student at the University of Hawaii.
It complained about poor performance over the satellite link to the Arpanet,
and suggested a particular approach to solving it. I turned to Jon and
said that it sounded pretty reasonable to me and might be worth developing
as an "option" to the Telnet terminal access protocol. Jon concurred with
my assessment. I said I'd be interested in giving a shot at the specification
if he would help me and he agreed. This was my first technical effort
and he mentored the process perfectly, always praising my newest version
and then observing a number of fatal flaws. His style was so clear and
direct that I was convinced he knew exactly how the protocol should be
done but was humoring me through the learning process. I had no understanding
of the general ignorance about building network protocols, at that stage
of the industry.
Eventually, the specification
stabilized and we published it. A few people implemented it and then it
died away, in spite of his publishing a revision a bit later. After a
few years I asked Jon about the reason it failed and he said that it apparently
had a fatal flaw which caused client and server machines to lose synchronization
with each other. Almost no one knows of this protocol today, but I consider
it a superb example of the real "decision" process of the Internet
community. One person suggested an idea. A couple of others fleshed it
out. Still more people tested it. No one complained about authority or
scope of responsibility, or following a particular process. No one worried
about egos and power. The focus was on the problem and its possible solution.
The problem was serious enough and the idea appealing enough, to get some
people interested in exploring it. The idea failed, but it failed on its
merits.
In the last two years,
Jon found himself painfully in the public eye. Some of his work had suddenly
become quite interesting, primarily because a decision at the US National
Science Foundation made some of the activities under him worth a lot of
money. This started an astonishing sequence of geo-politics and public
platform-seeking by many people who had no experience with Internet development,
administrations or operations. The money begat power, the power begat
the politics and the politics begat the publicity seekers. Through all
of it, Jon focused only and exactly on the underlying work. If he had
a failing, it was in refusing to engage in the politics and, perhaps,
in failing to institute some changes in his operation sooner. Unfortunately
these failings led to his being pilloried by some, with the press all-to-ready
to report the dramatic language.
I recently asked Jon
whether he was able to get any real work done, now, or whether he was
entirely consumed by the politics which surrounded the changes to his
group's operation. He admitted that he had not been able to do any other
work for nearly a year. I wonder how I would feel if I spent 25 years
offering a community his kind of public service, only to find myself attacked
so ruthlessly.
He was given some
awards over the last year. Perhaps in response to the attacks, the professional
community finally acknowledged his contribution formally. In spite of
this praise, it must have been a serious blow to Jon, who has always been
so modest and so well-intentioned, to be treated to such attacks. In 1991
he had heart operation and early this month he went into the hospital
to have another. It cannot have helped his state of mind to be under exactly
the sort of public pressure that he had always avoided. What effect did
that pressure have on his ability to recover?
Vint Cerf is again
Chair of the Internet Society's Board of Trustees and he has already pledged
that there will be a Jonathan B. Postel Service Award, given to those
who have contributed to the Internet community. Vint's announcement came
just as I was deciding that we needed some sort of continuing acknowledgement
of Jon's role in developing not just Internet technology, but Internet
culture. I think the service award is exactly the right formal monument.
However I also hope
that those engaged in the effort to evolve the organization that Jon built
over the last ten years will give him a living, and more practical, monument.
I hope that they will emulate his commitment to the community and his
focus on constructive, pragmatic evolution, eschewing personalities and
politics, and emphasizing community benefit. I hope that as the various
factions continue the debate for the evolution of his work, each participant
asks themselves carefully and honestly whether their contribution is worthy
of Jon.
