Changing the world quietly - Dave Crocker

 
(18 October 1998)  A Malasyian Journal:  Changing the world quietly

[ (C)  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.      ] 
[ To (un)subscribe, send me a note.  /Dave    ]

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.

d/

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Dave Crocker                                       Tel: +60 (19) 3299 445
             Post Office Box 296, U.P.M.
                                         Serdang, Selangor 43400 MALAYSIA
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