Jonathan B. Postel was one of the quiet load-bearing figures of the early internet. From the start of the ARPANET work he took on the job of editing and numbering the Request for Comments series, and he kept doing it for nearly thirty years until his death in 1998. RFC 2468, Vint Cerf’s memorial titled “I Remember IANA,” records the scale of that service: “For nearly 30 years, Jon has served us all, taken little in return, indeed sometimes receiving abuse when he should have received our deepest appreciation.”
Postel was not only the editor of the documents; he was an author of many of the most important ones. He wrote and shepherded the specification of the Internet Protocol, published as RFC 760 in January 1980 and revised as RFC 791, which defines how packets are addressed and routed across networks. He authored the Transmission Control Protocol specification and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, published as RFC 821 in August 1982, the document that still underlies internet email. His name appears on the masthead of an enormous fraction of the foundational standards.
For most of this period Postel personally was the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. When a protocol needed a well-known port number, a protocol identifier, or a reserved address range, the value came from Postel. He kept the registries of “assigned numbers” that let independently built systems agree on what the bytes meant, work later formalized in RFC 1700 and similar compilations. The phrase “as directed by the IANA” appeared in countless specifications, and for years the IANA was, in practice, one man with a list.
Postel is also remembered for the Robustness Principle, sometimes called Postel’s Law, which he stated in his TCP specification: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. It became a guiding aphorism for interoperable system design, advising implementers to send strictly correct data while tolerating the imperfect input that real networks inevitably produce.
His death in October 1998 came at a pivotal moment, just as the stewardship of names and numbers was being moved from his informal authority into the newly created ICANN. Cerf’s memorial closes the era plainly: “Jon, our beloved IANA, is gone.” The transition of the IANA functions into a formal institution was in many ways an attempt to replace, with committees and contracts, the trust that had rested in a single careful person.