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Portrait of Jon Postel

Jon Postel

(1943–1998) Computer Scientist United States

32 quotes in 222 categories

Jon Postel was a computer scientist from the United States.

Quick Facts About Jon Postel

Born: August 6, 1943
Died: October 16, 1998
Nationality: United States
Profession: Computer Scientist

About Jon Postel

Jonathan Bruce Postel was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death.

Biography source: Wikipedia

Awards & Honors

EFF Award SIGCOMM Award Jonathan B. Postel Service Award Internet Hall of Fame

Quotes by Jon Postel

I think that audio and video over the internet in the sense of teleconferencing and telephone calls. Maybe we'll actually have picture…

Audio

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Being in the limelight has its minuses.

Limelight

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

Computer

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

Addresses

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TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from…

Accepting

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

Government

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Be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.

Accepting

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

Spectacular

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

Done

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But as soon as we got that higher speed access to the home there?s going to be a tremendous crunch on the…

Access

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Group discussion is very valuable; group drafting is less productive.

Discussion

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

Should

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In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some…

Chemistry

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Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving…

Another

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Corporate documents, like football game plans, are not easily drafted in a stadium, with thousands of very interested fans participating, each with…

Ball game

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In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.

Behavior

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

Accept

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TCP works very hard to get the data delivered in order without errors and does retransmissions and recoveries and all that kind…

Any

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

Closest

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

Getting high

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Another aspect of our work is multimedia teleconferencing.

Another

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I also administer the Internet Assigned Names Authority, which is the central coordinator for the Internet address space, domain names and Internet…

Addresses

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

Internet

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Years ago when you?d go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now…

Building

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

Domain

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Jon Postel by topic