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

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UNITED STATES POSTEL SERVICE

Vint Cerf, a senior vice president for MCI Worldcom Incorporated, worked closely with Postel. "Jon was a very private person and didn't seek the limelight at all," said Cerf, who attended high school with Postel in California. "He preferred to exercise his stewardship role in a very quiet but competent way." "Being famous never drove Jon," agreed another longtime friend, David Farber, the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania. "He had tremendous influence, people respected his intellect." Though he wielded immense power in helping to set technical standards, particularly in the area of domain names, he worked behind the scenes, shunning publicity, and never made a fortune from his pioneering position. "Jon could have been a millionaire. It just wasn't his bag," said Professor Farber, who had been Postel's thesis adviser. The New York Times wrote, "Jon felt that starting a company to profit from his activities would have amounted to what he called a violation of public trust".

Early in 1998, Postel drew sharp criticism but demonstrated his influence when he redirected half of the Internet's twelve directory-information computers to his own system. He told federal officials afterward that he was running a test to see how smoothly such a transition could be made. A researcher at the University of Maryland at College Park, which controls one of those computers, told The Washington Post: "If Jon asked us to point somewhere else, we would do it. He was the authority there."

Postel passed away Friday, October 16, 1998, from complications from heart surgery to replace a leaking heart valve in a Los Angeles hospital. He was fifty-five years old. Cerf said Postel underwent a heart valve replacement in 1991, but the replacement valve started to leak October 10, 1998. He was quickly hospitalized for surgery and was recovering when he died suddenly. "One minute he was alert and laughing about a joke, and the next minute he was gone," Cerf said. "It was very fast." Cerf said Postel was survived by a brother, Mort Postel, who lived in Los Angeles. Khare learned of the news of Postel's death from Farber's Interesting People mailing list.

At Postel's funeral in Los Angeles on November 5, 1998, he was eulogized as a humble genius. For a technical genius, it was a simple send-off. Two dozen white paper airplanes were sent sailing over the crowd at the end of a memorial service, where more than two hundred people gathered to pay tribute.

Remembered as a "missionary," "bright, bearded student," "Eagle Scout," and "protocol tzar," friends and colleagues who gathered under the ornate arches in one of the University of Southern California's oldest buildings said Postel's contributions to the Internet were more than historic. Without him, the medium would not have existed. President Clinton's senior adviser, Ira Magaziner, compared Postel to Albert Einstein.

Like Postel, many attending the service belonged to the ground-breaking group of scientists and engineers who helped build the Net when they were just young university students. Some were alumni of the University of Southern California, where the service was held.

Postel's passing was a milestone in the bigger transformation of the Net from a collaborative project between the government and academia into a private backbone for global commerce and communication.

"It was Jon and his colleagues who helped create a revolution that will change mankind," said Magaziner, who, in addition to delivering his own eulogy read a letter from President Clinton acknowledging Postel's achievements.

"Jon was the first to pass from this group," he added before bringing some levity to the service, attended by a mixture of establishment players in suits and ties, long-haired academicians, and code warriors. He said Postel was probably hooking up to the Net in his afterlife. "He needs to set up the addressing system for when all his friends get there."

Postel, who loved hiking in Yosemite, was recognized by his long hair and beard, as well as by his often sandaled feet. He was a private man. And to those who knew him best, they thought of him as a somewhat shy genius whose greatest contributions took place behind the scenes. The turnout for his memorial, which included people ranging from high government and corporate officials to admiring graduate students, was a testimony to that.

"The facts don't do justice to the warm, complex person Jon was," said Robert Braden, senior researcher for USC's ISI. When credited with founding the Net, he was quick to point out that "others were there too."

"He could be stubborn," said Herbert Schorr, executive director of USC's ISI. "But he held power in a unique way - by forming a consensus. He tried to express the power of the community."

It is unlikely that Postel anticipated the impact the network address system he initiated ultimately would have. A meticulous organizer, Postel first kept track of Net addresses in a neat paper notebook. That was more than thirty years ago. Now there are millions of Internet addresses and a comparable number of people online.

"For years, he did the thankless job in the background and provided a tremendous amount of stability for the Net to incubate into what it is," said Don Telage, senior vice president of Internet relations for Network Solutions.

But not everyone here today remembered Postel just as a Net guru or as a key player in the battle over the domain name system. Some remembered him simply as a friend who was as much at home in front of a computer as he was hiking in the shadow of Half Dome. "He was humble and he touched my life royally," said Postel's assistant, Joe Kemp. "He put himself in the background and pushed others out front."

Postel's brothers, Thomas and Russell, wore socks with Teva sandals in a tribute to Postel's style, and his sister, Margie Bradshaw, took her shoes off to eulogize him. His mother Lois also was present, but didn't speak. "He was complicated," Russell Postel said, "but he lived simply."

I WANT TO PRAISE HIM LIKE I SHOULD

Postel's death came at a critical juncture for the Internet, with the federal government in the midst of largely turning over management of the worldwide network to a non-profit group that Postel helped organize. Jon Katz writes, "Someone of great import to the information world — one of the most influential people in the history of media — died and hardly anyone reading this will recognize his name or know much about what he did.

No newspaper in America put the obituary on its front page, no evening newscast ran a story about it, and no shrieking panelists were assembled on CNN to quarrel about his life.

In the graying culture that founded what we now call the Internet and the World Wide Web, Postel was known as the "Father of the Internet". With the possible exceptions of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, it's hard to think of a single being who had more of an impact on the information revolution, and you can bank upon the fact that universities of the future will have statues of him and buildings named in his honor.

Although few Americans have any reason to know he had lived or died, there was an enormous outpouring of grief on the Internet, most of it from people representing technical-sounding groups, organizations and institutions few have ever heard of.

The anthropology of the Web is jarringly different from that of the off-line media world, a disparity made compellingly clear by the way Postel's death was treated online. The names of the mourners' groups and organizations were themselves a window into a powerful and important sub-culture still little known to most of America.

"When Marconi died, the entire world observed two minutes of radio silence," wrote Nigel Roberts, administrator of the Channel Islands Domain Name Registry on a mailing list devoted to issues of Internet governance. "Jon Postel's contributions to world-wide communications are every bit the equal of Marconi and I feel turning our site black is the least we could do." In fact, countless Web sites devoted to Internet registration, domain names and digital architecture were shrouded in black for at least a week, even as the mainstream media had no idea who Postel was. Even the Network Information Center for the Chilean country code domain turned its page black.

Postel's death, and the extraordinary outpouring of grief that followed it, were reminders that the Internet is now old enough to have a history, one completely different from the history of any other kind of media or entity.

It's also a reminder that nobody really runs the Internet, initially because of government oversight and now because it would be nearly an impossibility. The Internet and the World Wide Web are so enormous, so global, fluid, individualistic and technical that it seems clearer every day that governing or controlling it is no longer possible.

"There is a whole group of first-generation Internet pioneers that are all like that," said Tara Lemmey, an online privacy advocate, of Postel. "It is all about getting information to people." In that sense, it's hard to imagine a more successful pioneer. More information is reaching more people than was even imaginable just a couple of decades ago. The death of the Father of the Internet might well be the biggest media story of the decade. How strange nobody bothered to cover it.

Taken from the text of RFC number 2468. "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." On the FoRK (Friends of Rohit Khare) mailing list, Jim Whitehead wrote of, "Joyce's assignment of the number 2468 to the RFC written to remember Jon. I never would have thought of that, and it was done so subtly that it didn't even ring a bell until someone sent me an e-mail asking whether this was a coincidence. In analog to classical mystery stories, the editor did it. Are they referring to the chant, "2, 4, 6, 8, who do we appreciate"? I can't think of any other obvious mappings. Yet another example of why computers will never understand human nuances." Khare notes that Postel edited over two hundred RFC's within the span of his entire career.

As Cerf said, "His taste in design was by and large extraordinary. And yet he did it in a way that you were only barely conscious that he was nudging you toward better design. As the rest of the Internet unfolds, we're going to discover that Jon isn't there to remind us what good taste means."

IN MEMORIUM

To those who asked Postel, "Well, who died and made you king?", he simply replied, "This is the way it is." He was not elected to the position of responsibility he held in the Internet community - he was simply, in the words of the White House's Internet policy adviser, Ira Magaziner, "the guy they trusted". "He really was the most powerful person on the Net," said Professor Farber. "He came by that power legitimately, as the only person who could command the respect and loyalty of the whole community." Postel, who was unmarried and had no children, was intensely private. When a trade publication profiled him and told him readers were interested in his personal life, he answered: "If we tell them about my personal life, they won't be interested anymore."

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

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