On 9/1/21 11:42 AM, Mel Beckman wrote:
For anyone unaware, Jon Postel, a good friend and mentor to many of us at the
dawn of the Internet, was the primary editor of this landmark document.
Those were the days we thought ARPAnet would never be allowed to go commercial.
Thanks to Jon’s tireless campaigning (among others), not to mention meticulous
documentation, it did.
He was taken from us too soon.
https://www.ietfjournal.org/in-memory-of-jon-postel/
RFC 791 and 793 are remarkably easy to read and follow what's going on.
And that's not just hindsight speaking. We implemented both a few years
later purely from the RFC's with no connection to anybody else and when
we actually had kit that was connected to the Internet it just worked.
One of the most remarkable things in my life was that I wrote debugger
for the OS I wrote for the Lantronix terminal servers which I ended up
remotely debugging in New Zealand. That was just mind blowing. Of course
you'd call that a backdoor these days but they were very happy that I
could figure out what was going on.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Jon, though I saw him at IETF meetings.
Mike
