Jon Postel Quotes (7 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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RFC 793: Transmission Control Protocol

Jon Postel

Jon Postel: 7 quotes 0 likes

Famous Jon Postel Quotes

“Of course, there isn’t any "God of the Internet." The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.”

Jon Postel

When asked "What do you think of being called a god?" in "Heavenly Father of the NET", an interview article in NetWorker (Summer 1997); This refers to a statement "if the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel", which appeared in the British magazine The Economist.
Context: I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet. But at the end, that article wasn’t very complimentary, because the author suggested that I wasn’t doing a very good job, and that I ought to be replaced by a "professional."
Of course, there isn’t any "God of the Internet." The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.

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

Jon Postel RFC 793: Transmission Control Protocol

The "Robustness Principle", RFC 793 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0793.txt, Transmission Control Protocol, entire text of section 2.10 (September 1981).

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

Jon Postel

RFC 791 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0791.txt, Internet Protocol (September 1981)
Often shortened to Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

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

Jon Postel

RFC (Request for Comments) document: RFC 791 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0791.txt, Internet Protocol (September 1981)
This is often mistakenly attributed to Jon Postel, but it is actually a very slight variation on a quotation from John Shoch; both RFC-791 and its earlier version RFC-760 include, at the point in the text where this passage appears, a reference to Shoch's paper Inter-Network Naming, Addressing, and Routing, which is the original source of this observation.
Misattributed

“He worked quietly for years as keeper of the RFCs and final arbiter in technical matters when consensus couldn’t be reached. Postel believed that decisions he had made in the course of his work over the years had been for the good of the community and that starting a company to profit from those activities would have amounted to a violation of public trust.”

Jon Postel

Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996) by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon

“I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet. But at the end, that article wasn’t very complimentary, because the author suggested that I wasn’t doing a very good job, and that I ought to be replaced by a "professional."”

Jon Postel

Of course, there isn’t any "God of the Internet." The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.
When asked "What do you think of being called a god?" in "Heavenly Father of the NET", an interview article in NetWorker (Summer 1997); This refers to a statement "if the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel", which appeared in the British magazine The Economist.