Quotes by Jon Postel

About Jon Postel:

Jonathan Bruce Postel is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational.

Jon Postel

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

Jon Postel

But as soon as we got that higher speed access to the home there's going to be a tremendous crunch on the backbones for a much higher speed bandwidth. People really ought to be planning for that.

Jon Postel

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.

Jon Postel

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

Jon Postel

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

Jon Postel

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

Jon Postel

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

Jon Postel

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

Jon Postel

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

Jon Postel

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.

Jon Postel

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.

Jon Postel

The overriding rule, if you want to run a domain, is to be fair.

Jon Postel

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.

Jon Postel

All this stuff was done via FTP but the web has put a really nice user interface on it.

Jon Postel

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.

Jon Postel

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.

Jon Postel

Years ago when you'd go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now most of the people are from companies who are building internet products and care what the standards turn out to be.

Jon Postel

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

Jon Postel

Everyone should have ten megabits and then the web will be a wonderful thing.

Jon Postel

Author Bio

  • NameJon Postel
  • DescriptionInternet pioneer
  • AliasesJonathan B. Postel; Jonathan Postel; Jonathan Bruce Postel
  • BornAugust 6, 1943
  • DiedOctober 16, 1998
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionComputer Scientist
  • AwardsEFF Pioneer Award