Jon Postel Quotes

Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving the use of one computer to measure the performance of another computer.

That was clearly surprising, interesting – a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it.

One of the things that is not so good is that a decision was made long ago about the size of an IP address – 32 bits. At the time it was a number much larger than anyone could imagine ever having that many computers but it turned out to be to small.

Another aspect of our work is multimedia teleconferencing.

But I do have a computer at home and a pretty good ISDN connection.

One way to get high speed to the home is over cable systems.

The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.

Being in the limelight has its minuses.

A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there.

Group discussion is very valuable; group drafting is less productive.

I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet.

The routers get involved in this and they know that on the path between this router and that router a certain percentage of the bandwidth is reserved to these things and a certain percentage of it is allowed on a first come first served basis.

Corporate documents, like football game plans, are not easily drafted in a stadium, with thousands of very interested fans participating, each with their own red pencil, trying to reach a consensus on every word.

I also administer the Internet Assigned Names Authority, which is the central coordinator for the Internet address space, domain names and Internet protocol conventions essential to the use and operation of the Internet.

The world wide web has really been quite spectacular and not something I would have predicted.

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

TCP works very hard to get the data delivered in order without errors and does retransmissions and recoveries and all that kind of stuff which is exactly what you want in a file transfer because so you don’t want any errors in your file.

I got involved when I was a graduate student at UCLA when UCLA was the first site on the net.

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

If you’re in charge of managing domain name space you should treat everybody who asks for a registration the same. Whatever that is – whether it’s nice or ugly or whatever – just be fair, treat them all the same.