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  the Software View: In praise of Postel. The life and times of an Internet legend. (Part I)

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GOING POSTEL

Doctor Jonathan B. Postel was an Internet pioneer who wielded enormous influence managing technical details of the global computer network and was the keeper of the Internet's top-level domain names. Postel was one of the architects of the Internet, one of the handful of technologists, scientists, geeks and gurus who worked to bring some order to the remarkable new information network that seems to have exploded into being all by itself in the late l960's. It is now a little over a year since his passing away and I thought it appropriate to reflect upon the legacy he bequeathed to us.

In the l960's, the government decided to build and fund a series of networked computer sites that would permit scientists and military officials to communicate with one another in the event of a nuclear attack, and also give defense researchers a means of communicating with one another and sharing information in peacetime. Outside of a few government agencies and a handful of universities like MIT and Stanford, nobody paid much attention to the idea. It was just another Cold War defense notion.

This network was called the ARPANET. The military never did do very much with it, but it attracted swarms of geeks, science fiction addicts, hackers, nerds, scientists, cyber-hippies, futurists and gurus and teen-aged boys holed up in their bedrooms with circuit boards and phone codes.

The Internet was never controlled, planned or designed. It exploded abruptly into one of the most extraordinary and transformative technological advances in human history. The government lost control of the Internet from the beginning. And when the Cold War ended, the Internet became a global medium almost overnight as information-starved scientists and educators in formerly communist-controlled countries piled on.

Postel was the director and top administrator of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the non-profit technical body that oversees the Internet's Domain Name System and allocated IP addresses. He was also a founding member of the Internet Architecture Board, a trustee of the Internet Society, and the caretaker of the ".us" domain.

Postel was also the official RFC editor. Short for Request for Comments, RFC's are a series of notes about the Internet, started in 1969 (when the Internet was the ARPANET). An RFC can be submitted by anyone. Eventually, if it gains enough interest, it may evolve into an Internet standard. Postel was "responsible for the final editorial review of the documents," giving him wide power as to the way Internet standards were shaped over the years.

A small group of scientists collected to try to bring some order to the Internet. Someone had to keep track of all the protocols, identifiers, networks and addresses, and ultimately the names of all of the almost countless things in the suddenly vast and rapidly expanding networked universe, as well as seek to bring some order to the chaotic debates, discussions, inventions and evolutions that accompanied this growth.

"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," wrote a grieving Vint Cerf, co-author of the Internet Protocol and chairman of the Internet Society, the nonprofit group that is the closest thing the Net has to a governing entity.

Postel was one of the most important and influential members of the small group of scientists who gathered in the ARPANET era to develop the first protocols for the Internet and pulled off one of the most extraordinary feats of science. Tens of millions of people send information, messages and imagery digitally seven days a week, twenty-four hours per day, from computers all over the world, and the overwhelming majority of this information goes through quickly and reliably. Even though the computer industry is a nightmare of complex, poorly marketed and ill-understood machinery, the Internet works so well we never even think about how it really is put together. Postel was present when the first digital packet was switched. During his career, he not only created protocols for the Internet's domain-naming system, but also for email and online file transfers - all of which now form the cornerstone of the New Economy.

Postel was one of a number of mostly unknown scientists and engineers who worked to establish the Internet as a free and accessible place. He, like many of the early Net founders, was dedicated to setting up cyberspace in a way that would free the flow of information to as many people as possible. The Net was established as a completely different kind of medium: one that offered unprecedented power, freedom and access for individual users.

"He was one of the foundations of why the Internet exists," wrote Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive Project and inventor of the WAIS Internet searching scheme. "The underlying infrastructure is a tribute to a bunch of selfless people," Kahle said.

Rohit Khare (a Doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of California, Irvine; member of the MCI Internet Architecture staff; previously a technical staff member of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT; and a graduate of the California Institute of Technology) writes, "flying into Los Angeles is about as close as you can get to cyberspace: an indefinite feeling of being between places. It's an appropriate place to meditate, not just on Jon's life and good works, but upon the very notion of grief for the loss of a man I arguably never knew. Elsewhere in this issue, you'll read testimonials from his friends and colleagues. I am neither - I am his student."

Postel was born August 6, 1943. He achieved his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Engineering, and his Doctorate in Computer Science from UCLA, in 1966, 1968, and 1974 respectively. It was twenty-six years ago that Postel submitted his Doctoral thesis. That thesis was seminal in establishing the field of protocol validation.

Postel was considered by the Clinton administration to be a crucial player in the future of the Internet. Though Postel worked behind the scenes and was hardly known outside high-tech circles, his role as director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority allowed the Internet to match unique numerical addresses for computers on the global network with its millions of Web addresses. So powerful was Postel that The Economist magazine dubbed him "god" of the Internet. David Bennahum writes, "In a sense, those who control the names on the Internet control everything, because when everything is said and done, the Internet is mostly a big pile of words. Words, like "mtv.com" or "altavista.com" and "harvard.edu" have become brands with real financial value. And for a long, long time Postel controlled the issuance of those new words.

From his office in Southern California, this scientist had been responsible for administering name disputes at the highest level of the Internet's naming architecture. It was he who decided to whom, in a foreign country, would be given control of the two letter code. It was he who held, as Fortune magazine put it, "control of the little black book of Internet addresses that enables the Internet to work."

Khare writes, "The Domain Name System is the ultimate example of a technical artifact predicated on a Postel." What are some examples of top-level domain names? ".com", ".edu", and ".org" are some example top-level domain names. But geographic country codes like France (".fr") and Germany (".de") are also some examples. How did Postel come up with that list? He was accidently very clever a long time ago. What if someone wanted to use their geographic country as a top-level domain name? Well, it turns out that there's a list maintained by the ISO, the International Standards Organization, of two-letter codes for geographic countries. Postel decided to use the two-letter codes from the ISO Standard Document 3166 list for geographic country codes, published in 1981. If the requester's country was on the geographic country code list, and the requester originated from that country and nobody else has gotten there first, then Postel granted the top-level domain name to the requester.

Postel's typical day consisted of trying to keep his research projects running. All of the top-level domain name activities were supposed to occupy only about ten percent of his time. The Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a research institute that's part of the University of Southern California. They would propose ideas for advanced computer science, they would solicit a sponsor for that research, the sponsor would send them money, and they would do the research. The research would consist of projects such as high speed networks and distributive systems. He joined USC's ISI in 1977, eventually becoming its director.

When the Internet existed as a collective of mainly academic, governmental and military Web sites, this system was politically acceptable. Postel had been involved with inter-networking for over twenty years, since the time it was called the ARPANET. He started out as a student at UCLA when the ARPANET was first created. So he got involved in the ARPANET project at UCLA, and he had been involved in network-related things ever since. His central control of the top-level domain names was a simple, efficient way of managing what was then the Net's Uniform Resource Locator database. But in 1993, when the National Science Foundation transferred administration of sub-domain names, names like "sun.com" and "http://www.softwareview.com", to Network Solutions Incorporated, a Virginia-based company, the old boy network began to falter. With commercial entities relying on the Internet for commerce and brand expansion, the question of adjudication, control and accountability for the issuance of new "top-level domains" became a matter of great interest. The idea of one man - Postel - controlling a database of increasing value became politically untenable. The resulting governing body was probably going to resemble a Board of Directors, with Postel as a member.

To be continued ...

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

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