Remembrance/postel - Dave Farber and Vint Cerf

Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 07:28:40 -0400
From: Dave Farber 
Subject: IP: Remembrance/postel

I, and others I fear, have spent a sleepless night after hearing
of the death of Jon Postel last night. This morning there was a
note in my mail box from Vint Cerf that said many of the things
I feel at this time. I asked him for permission to send on which
he granted.

I also remember Jon. I was his primary thesis advisor along with
Jerry Estrin and I remember with fond memories the months spent
closely working with Jon while his eager mind developed the
ideas in back of what was a pioneering thesis that founded the
area of protocol verification.  Since I was at UC Irvine and Jon
at UCLA we used to meet in the morning prior to my ride to UCI
at a Pancake House in Santa Monica for breakfast and the hard
work of developing a thesis. I gained a great respect for Jon
then and 10 pounds of weight.

I will miss him greatly. Jon was my second Ph.D. student. The
first, Philip Merlin, also died way before his time.

Dave

_________________________________________________________________

 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.