When I first heard of Jon's death, my first reaction was shock at a man so
alive and active; my second, despair at works-in-progress lost aborning;
and then, a struggle to reconcile the keenness of my loss when I was
arguably neither a friend nor a colleague.
While I can't testify to "the man" in the usual style of eulogy, the column
I've attached is a memorial of "the works". Somewhere in the chorus of
praise for Jon's leadership and good nature belongs a refrain in honor of
his actual bits on the wire. I felt his loss as a *student*: directly, in
the case of my year's analysis of his protocols; and indirectly, as I toil
in the archives he maintained.
I am very disappointed I won't be able to attend the memorial Thursday.
Instead,
I'm winging my way to Orlando right now for a tutorial on WebDAV and XML -
prosyletizing yet another protocol so hyperspecialized Jon may not have
recognized it, and just as incontrovertibly part of Jon's legacy. Right
down to the error codes...
Thanks, Jon!
Rohit Khare
PS. Feel free to redistribute/repost
-- Rohit Khare -- UC Irvine -- 4K Associates -- +1-(626) 806-7574 http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit -- http://xent.ics.uci.edu/~FoRK====================================================================== [Survey of Network News Protocols omitted: see http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/]
Reflections on the Wizard of TPs By Rohit Khare
October 19, 1998, Aboard United #163 -- The last time I was flying into Los Angeles, I was also facing a blank screen entitled Seventh Heaven. Two months ago, though, I relied on a fellow passenger to help me frame the twenty-five year design history of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) into a neat evolutionary tale -- its author, Jon Postel. I never quite got around to accepting his invitation to drop by ISI and set to documenting the further (technical) history of Internet protocol design. Someday, I thought, the "DNS Wars" will be over, a rechartered IANA born, and all the time in the world (or at least the interminable horizon of a doctoral program!) to listen to the old griot's tales of Transfer Protocols.
Well, the founding articles for the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers were signed October 5th, and the Wizard of TPs took off in his hot air balloon to domains unregistered forthwith.
Up here is about as close as you can get to cyberspace: an indefinite feeling of being between places. It's an appropriate place to meditate, not just on Jon's life and good works, but upon the very notion of grief for the loss of a man I arguably never knew. Elsewhere in this issue, you'll read testimonials from his friends and colleagues. I am neither -- I am his student. And so, let me take a moment to survey his works...
To date, this column has dissected Telnet, FTP, and SMTP, all of which Jon edited himself -- along with TCP, IP, and ICMP, to boot! As we continue to reconstruct the evolution of application-layer protocols, such as this month's Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), we will move on to other designers' work, but always in Jon's shadow: the theory of error/reply codes, the RFC style of documentation, the careful identification of reliability and security risks, the very gestalt of simplicity and interoperability can be traced to Jon as RFC Editor and Internet Architecture Board member.
"His taste in design was by and large extraordinary. And yet he did it in a way that you were only barely conscious that he was nudging you toward better design. As the rest of the Internet unfolds, we're going to discover that Jon isn't there to remind us what good taste means." -- Vint Cerf, Internet Society Chairman
The Wizard of TPs
While Jon was already on the UCLA programming team at the installation of IMP#1, and proceeded to document the ARPANET's low-level protocols in the "70s, his role at the application layer bloomed during the changeover to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. He took the lead in consciously reengineering several ARPANET services to work on the new Internet: separating MTP from FTP-1, FTP from Telnet, debugging services at the packet (control message) and upper layers (STDs 5-10, 20-26), and arranging gateways to translate back and forth to the new style of addressing. Even so, Table 1 omits further work on managing the transition (see #771, #773, and #801).
That's not to say that Jon was done, having cleaned the Big Three Augean stables. His interest in formats ranging from a single byte (#128) to structured digital audio (#978) informed his foresight for multimedia mail (#805, #807) to a little-known unified messaging architecture proposal (#759). His design sense inspired other protocols, some literally patterned on his precedent, others through his influence on the process. Why isn't there an Internet equivalent of Mach-like interprocess communication by mailboxes and datagrams? "... Jon did have one button you plain didn't want to push: the one labeled "reliable datagram.' Push it and you risk an immediate charge of heresy," quoth Greg Finn, a colleague of Jon's for two decades.
Sometimes the influence of man and institution are hopelessly intertwingled. IANA is well-known for its controversial role at the apex of domain name and network number registries, but it is also responsible for a laundry list of other application parameters. Many protocols' extensibility strategies relied explicitly on Jon's good taste as gatekeeper for the options in Table 2.
The Domain Name System, then, is the ultimate example of a technical artifact predicated on a Postel. He took the lead in organizing a replacement for the centrally updated and manually distributed HOSTS.TXT. His colleague Paul Mockapetris' protocol funnels trust upward to a set of high-fidelity root servers -- coordinated by a (presumably) benign central authority.
"[Jon] replied that starting a company to profit from his activities would have amounted to what he called a "violation of public trust.'" -- New York Times
Building an Internet without Jon
Santayana aside, what's the virtue of dredging through sheaves of old RFCs? Rather than repeat history -- or, equivalently, extrapolate linearly as with rumblings of scaled-up Interplanetary IP -- we are liberated to invent a new network: one that radically decentralizes control.
The application protocols we have today are distributed, to be sure: multiple actors reading from the same script, enacting a single algorithm in many places. A truly paranoid network, though, doesn't trust routing and naming subsystems blindly. Today, email messages are handed off in an adminstratively-determined pathway represented in DNS MX records. That's why mail to the user next door goes cross-country three times up and down the corporate ladder. Alternatively, a mail/news/web message relay could discover its neighbors, seal trust relationships, and be introduced to colleagues' relays to build a personal net, without relying on a global grid.
It's a minor contribution to automate humans out of the loop for a billion Internet PCs -- but mandatory for trillions of cellular nanocomputers. They may never swap IP packets, but their engineering will owe as much to Jonathan Postel as to Boole, Babbage, and Hollerith.
"He leaves a legacy of edited documents that tell our collective Internet story, including not only the technical but also the poetic and whimsical as well." -- #2468 (as in "Who do we appreciate?")
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1: Postel's Greatest Hits.
A few highlights from Jon's 200 career RFCs. (Joyce Reynolds, also of ISI, co-authored almost a fifth -- 37 in all)
RFC Date Title and Comments
2400 24 Sep Internet Official Protocol Standards STD 1 1998 23rd edition of IETF standards process; and -- Dec status of every proposal 1988
2278 29 Jan IANA Charset Registration Procedures BCP 19 1998 Open registry for 1-1 coded sets as well as multi-octet encodings
2223 16 Oct Instructions to RFC Authors 1997 4th edition of format, style, and legal rules; -- Nov the essence of Jon's taste 1982
2048 30 Nov MIME Part 4: Registration Procedures BCP 13 1996 Disclosure rules for new media types, access methods, and encodings
2014 17 Oct IRTF Research Group Guidelines and Procedures 1996 Policy and principles for IETF's parallel long-term investigative arm
1818 4 Aug Best Current Practices BCP 1 1995 Inaugurating a new series of less formal, non-binding documents
1796 25 Apr Not All RFCs are Standards 1995 ...though Internet-Drafts are the real requests for comment today
1692 17 Aug Transport Multiplexing Protocol (TMux) 1994 Combines many small packets aimed at a single interactive host
1591 3 Mar Domain Name System Structure and Delegation 1994 Laid out principles for operating Top Level Domain (TLD) registrars
1480 28 Jun The US Domain 1993 Exemplar operations of the .us registry: states, counties, cities, &c
1211 22 Mar Problems with the Maintenance of Large Mailing 1991 Lists Experience from ietf@ietf.org re: error messages, delays, loops...
1121 1 Sep Act one -- the poems 1989 Light verse on the occasion of the ARPANET's 20th birthday
959 1 Oct File Transfer Protocol STD 9 1985 Still accounted for the largest share of Internet traffic until April 96
920 1 Oct Domain Requirements 1984 Others led the development of DNS protocols, but Jon lit the fuse
862-8 1 May Time, Daytime, Active Users, Quote of the Day STDs 1983 Protocol, 20-26 Character Generator, Discard, and Echo Protocols Part of the basic Host Requirements, mainly for debugging
854-861 1 May Telnet and List, Timing Mark, Status, Suppress STD 8 1983 Go Ahead, Echo, Binary, and Negotiation Options The very first Internet application protocol; options are STDs 27-32
821 1 Aug Simple Mail Transfer Protocol STD 10 1981 Classic design; conscious reengineering of existing Mailbox protocol
793 1 Sep Transmission Control Protocol STD 7 1981 10th revision of a reliable host-to-host connection, with interrupts
792 1 Sep Internet Control Message Protocol STD 5 1981 Status/error messages from interior gateways/routers back to hosts
791 1 Sep Internet Protocol STD 5 1981 7th revision of IP for Cerf's "catenet"; with options and fragments
768 28 Aug User Datagram Protocol STD 6 1980 Jon's one hot button: the U stands just as much for Unreliable
759 1 Aug Internet Message Protocol 1980 A tantalizing evolutionary cul-de-sac: a universal multimedia message envelope relayed between Message Processing Modules
706 8 Nov On the junk mail problem 1975 20 years early, Jon proposed mail relays track, block offending sites
346 30 Satellite considerations May1972 Everything old is new again: IP-in-the-sky is now worth billions
204 5 Aug Sockets in use 1971 "I would like to collect information on the use of socket numbers..."
45 14 Apr New Protocol Is Coming 1970 Jon's first RFC, promising "a clean version of the Network Protocol"
Table 2: Selected Application-Layer parameters maintained by IANA
Access-Types Retrieval methods for MIME bodies (e.g. FTP, mail robots)
Character Registry of various national and linguistic Sets character coding tables
Directories Keywords for presenting X.500: CommonName, OrganizationUnit, &c
GSSAPI/SASL Secured application Ids (e.g. Kerberos tickets for ftp or nfs privileges)
HTTP Content-Encodings: gzip, compress, deflate, chunked (in 1.1)
Languages Lists of (human) language codes beyond the ISO set, e.g. i-navajo
Media Types Documentation of content types under text/, image/, video/, etc...
Ports Well-Known (0-1023); Registered (1-48K); and Dynamic/Private (48-64K)
Telnet Standards-track options; as well as their Options parameters like Terminal Types
URL Schemes Registry and references for ftp:, http:, uuid:, data:, rtsp:, etc. --============_-1302022764==_ma============ Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<fontfamily><param>LucidaSansTypewriter</param><bigger>When I first heard of Jon's death, my first reaction was shock at a man so alive and active; my second, despair at works-in-progress lost aborning; and then, a struggle to reconcile the keenness of my loss when I was arguably neither a friend nor a colleague.
While I can't testify to "the man" in the usual style of eulogy, the column I've attached is a memorial of "the works". Somewhere in the chorus of praise for Jon's leadership and good nature belongs a refrain in honor of his actual bits on the wire. I felt his loss as a *student*: directly, in the case of my year's analysis of his protocols; and indirectly, as I toil in the archives he maintained.
I am very disappointed I won't be able to attend the memorial Thursday. Instead,=20
I'm winging my way to Orlando right now for a tutorial on WebDAV and XML - prosyletizing yet another protocol so hyperspecialized Jon may not have recognized it, and just as incontrovertibly part of Jon's legacy. Right down to the error codes...
Thanks, Jon!
Rohit Khare
PS. Feel free to redistribute/repost
--=20
Rohit Khare -- UC Irvine -- 4K Associates -- +1-(626) 806-7574
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit -- http://xent.ics.uci.edu/~FoRK
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
[Survey of Network News Protocols omitted: see </bigger></fontfamily><bigger><underline><fontfamily><param>Times</param><co= lor><param>0000,0000,00FF</param><bigger>http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/</big= ger></color></fontfamily></underline><fontfamily><param>LucidaSansTypewriter= </param>]
Reflections on the Wizard of TPs
By Rohit Khare
October 19, 1998, Aboard United #163 -- The last time I was flying into Los
Angeles, I was also facing a blank screen entitled Seventh Heaven. Two
months ago, though, I relied on a fellow passenger to help me frame the
twenty-five year design history of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
into a neat evolutionary tale -- its author, Jon Postel. I never quite got
around to accepting his invitation to drop by ISI and set to documenting the
further (technical) history of Internet protocol design. Someday, I thought,
the "DNS Wars" will be over, a rechartered IANA born, and all the time in
the world (or at least the interminable horizon of a doctoral program!) to
listen to the old griot's tales of Transfer Protocols.
Well, the founding articles for the International Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers were signed October 5th, and the Wizard of TPs took off in
his hot air balloon to domains unregistered forthwith.
Up here is about as close as you can get to cyberspace: an indefinite
feeling of being between places. It's an appropriate place to meditate, not
just on Jon's life and good works, but upon the very notion of grief for the
loss of a man I arguably never knew. Elsewhere in this issue, you'll read
testimonials from his friends and colleagues. I am neither -- I am his
student. And so, let me take a moment to survey his works...
To date, this column has dissected Telnet, FTP, and SMTP, all of which Jon
edited himself -- along with TCP, IP, and ICMP, to boot! As we continue to
reconstruct the evolution of application-layer protocols, such as this
month's Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), we will move on to other
designers' work, but always in Jon's shadow: the theory of error/reply
codes, the RFC style of documentation, the careful identification of
reliability and security risks, the very gestalt of simplicity and
interoperability can be traced to Jon as RFC Editor and Internet
Architecture Board member.
"His taste in design was by and large extraordinary. And yet he
did it in a way that you were only barely conscious that he was
nudging you toward better design. As the rest of the Internet
unfolds, we're going to discover that Jon isn't there to remind us
what good taste means." -- Vint Cerf, Internet Society Chairman
The Wizard of TPs
While Jon was already on the UCLA programming team at the installation of
IMP#1, and proceeded to document the ARPANET's low-level protocols in the
"70s, his role at the application layer bloomed during the changeover to
TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. He took the lead in consciously reengineering
several ARPANET services to work on the new Internet: separating MTP from
=46TP-1, FTP from Telnet, debugging services at the packet (control message)
and upper layers (STDs 5-10, 20-26), and arranging gateways to translate
back and forth to the new style of addressing. Even so, Table 1 omits
further work on managing the transition (see #771, #773, and #801).
That's not to say that Jon was done, having cleaned the Big Three Augean
stables. His interest in formats ranging from a single byte (#128) to
structured digital audio (#978) informed his foresight for multimedia mail
(#805, #807) to a little-known unified messaging architecture proposal
(#759). His design sense inspired other protocols, some literally patterned
on his precedent, others through his influence on the process. Why isn't
there an Internet equivalent of Mach-like interprocess communication by
mailboxes and datagrams? "... Jon did have one button you plain didn't want
to push: the one labeled "reliable datagram.' Push it and you risk an
immediate charge of heresy," quoth Greg Finn, a colleague of Jon's for two
decades.
Sometimes the influence of man and institution are hopelessly intertwingled.
IANA is well-known for its controversial role at the apex of domain name and
network number registries, but it is also responsible for a laundry list of
other application parameters. Many protocols' extensibility strategies
relied explicitly on Jon's good taste as gatekeeper for the options in Table
2.
The Domain Name System, then, is the ultimate example of a technical
artifact predicated on a Postel. He took the lead in organizing a
replacement for the centrally updated and manually distributed HOSTS.TXT.
His colleague Paul Mockapetris' protocol funnels trust upward to a set of
high-fidelity root servers -- coordinated by a (presumably) benign central
authority.
"[Jon] replied that starting a company to profit from his
activities would have amounted to what he called a "violation of
public trust.'" -- New York Times
Building an Internet without Jon
Santayana aside, what's the virtue of dredging through sheaves of old RFCs?
Rather than repeat history -- or, equivalently, extrapolate linearly as with
rumblings of scaled-up Interplanetary IP -- we are liberated to invent a new
network: one that radically decentralizes control.
The application protocols we have today are distributed, to be sure:
multiple actors reading from the same script, enacting a single algorithm in
many places. A truly paranoid network, though, doesn't trust routing and
naming subsystems blindly. Today, email messages are handed off in an
adminstratively-determined pathway represented in DNS MX records. That's why
mail to the user next door goes cross-country three times up and down the
corporate ladder. Alternatively, a mail/news/web message relay could
discover its neighbors, seal trust relationships, and be introduced to
colleagues' relays to build a personal net, without relying on a global
grid.
It's a minor contribution to automate humans out of the loop for a billion
Internet PCs -- but mandatory for trillions of cellular nanocomputers. They
may never swap IP packets, but their engineering will owe as much to
Jonathan Postel as to Boole, Babbage, and Hollerith.
"He leaves a legacy of edited documents that tell our collective
Internet story, including not only the technical but also the
poetic and whimsical as well." -- #2468 (as in "Who do we
appreciate?")
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 1: Postel's Greatest Hits.
A few highlights from Jon's 200 career RFCs. (Joyce Reynolds, also of ISI,
co-authored almost a fifth -- 37 in all)
RFC Date Title and Comments
2400 24 Sep Internet Official Protocol Standards
STD 1 1998 23rd edition of IETF standards process; and
-- Dec status of every proposal
1988
2278 29 Jan IANA Charset Registration Procedures
BCP 19 1998 Open registry for 1-1 coded sets as well as
multi-octet encodings
2223 16 Oct Instructions to RFC Authors
1997 4th edition of format, style, and legal rules;
-- Nov the essence of Jon's taste
1982
2048 30 Nov MIME Part 4: Registration Procedures
BCP 13 1996 Disclosure rules for new media types, access
methods, and encodings
2014 17 Oct IRTF Research Group Guidelines and Procedures
1996 Policy and principles for IETF's parallel
long-term investigative arm
1818 4 Aug Best Current Practices
BCP 1 1995 Inaugurating a new series of less formal,
non-binding documents
1796 25 Apr Not All RFCs are Standards
1995 ...though Internet-Drafts are the real
requests for comment today
1692 17 Aug Transport Multiplexing Protocol (TMux)
1994 Combines many small packets aimed at a single
interactive host
1591 3 Mar Domain Name System Structure and Delegation
1994 Laid out principles for operating Top Level
Domain (TLD) registrars
1480 28 Jun The US Domain
1993 Exemplar operations of the .us registry:
states, counties, cities, &c
1211 22 Mar Problems with the Maintenance of Large Mailing
1991 Lists
Experience from ietf@ietf.org re: error
messages, delays, loops...
1121 1 Sep Act one -- the poems
1989 Light verse on the occasion of the ARPANET's
20th birthday
959 1 Oct File Transfer Protocol
STD 9 1985 Still accounted for the largest share of
Internet traffic until April 96
920 1 Oct Domain Requirements
1984 Others led the development of DNS protocols,
but Jon lit the fuse
862-8 1 May Time, Daytime, Active Users, Quote of the Day
STDs 1983 Protocol,
20-26 Character Generator, Discard, and Echo Protocols
Part of the basic Host Requirements, mainly
for debugging
854-861 1 May Telnet and List, Timing Mark, Status, Suppress
STD 8 1983 Go Ahead, Echo, Binary, and Negotiation Options
The very first Internet application protocol;
options are STDs 27-32
821 1 Aug Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
STD 10 1981 Classic design; conscious reengineering of
existing Mailbox protocol
793 1 Sep Transmission Control Protocol
STD 7 1981 10th revision of a reliable host-to-host
connection, with interrupts
792 1 Sep Internet Control Message Protocol
STD 5 1981 Status/error messages from interior
gateways/routers back to hosts
791 1 Sep Internet Protocol
STD 5 1981 7th revision of IP for Cerf's "catenet"; with
options and fragments
768 28 Aug User Datagram Protocol
STD 6 1980 Jon's one hot button: the U stands just as
much for Unreliable
759 1 Aug Internet Message Protocol
1980 A tantalizing evolutionary cul-de-sac: a
universal multimedia message envelope relayed
between Message Processing Modules
706 8 Nov On the junk mail problem
1975 20 years early, Jon proposed mail relays
track, block offending sites
346 30 Satellite considerations
May1972 Everything old is new again: IP-in-the-sky is
now worth billions
204 5 Aug Sockets in use
1971 "I would like to collect information on the
use of socket numbers..."
45 14 Apr New Protocol Is Coming
1970 Jon's first RFC, promising "a clean version of
the Network Protocol"
Table 2: Selected Application-Layer parameters maintained by IANA
Access-Types Retrieval methods for MIME bodies (e.g. FTP, mail
robots)
=20
Character Registry of various national and linguistic
Sets character coding tables
Directories Keywords for presenting X.500: CommonName,
OrganizationUnit, &c
GSSAPI/SASL Secured application Ids (e.g. Kerberos tickets
for ftp or nfs privileges)
=20
HTTP Content-Encodings: gzip, compress, deflate,
chunked (in 1.1)
Languages Lists of (human) language codes beyond the ISO
set, e.g. i-navajo
Media Types Documentation of content types under text/,
image/, video/, etc...
Ports Well-Known (0-1023); Registered (1-48K); and
Dynamic/Private (48-64K)
Telnet Standards-track options; as well as their
Options parameters like Terminal Types
URL Schemes Registry and references for ftp:, http:, uuid:,
data:, rtsp:, etc.</fontfamily></bigger>
--============_-1302022764==_ma============--