The worldwide internet community was shocked and saddened over the weekend to hear of the death of Jon Postel at the age of 55. Postel was the director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), as well as the co-inventor of the domain name system (DNS) and editor of the request for comments (RFCs) series of documents, which quickly became the de facto method for creating standards on the internet. Postel died suddenly Friday night, October 16, in St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, while recovering from surgery to fix a heart replacement valve, which had started to leak. He was apparently in mid-conversation with a colleague, Danny Cohen, when he passed away. Postel had surgery in 1991 to insert the aortic valve. It was well known within the internet community that Postel was ill and in hospital having the treatment, but it was not public knowledge, probably because Postel did not want it to be.

By Nick Patience

Nowhere within the internet infrastructure – and probably within the entire high-tech industry – was one sector dominated by one person in the way Postel dominated the IANA. As its director, he was responsible for allocating the blocks of IP addresses to regional number authorities, oversaw its work in developing protocols, administered one of the 13 root servers that ensure that the DNS maintains an accurate list of all the internet’s domain names, and was also the administrator of the ‘.us’ country-code top-level domain. As such, the IANA could hardly be considered a democratic organization and Postel often rubbed people up the wrong way, with a reticence many mistook as arrogance. Postel rose to public prominence over the past couple of years at the forefront of the battle to wrest control of the DNS from the US government (for which he worked as a contractor at IANA) to a private sector non-profit corporation. It was thought that he would end up as the chief technology officer of any future corporation as Postel was an engineer first, and only a reluctant and reticent politician. Postel joined the University of California in Los Angeles’ (UCLA) computer science department in 1969 as one of its first graduate students and worked under Professor Len Kleinrock as a research assistant on the Arpanet project, the precursor to the internet. He then pursued a PhD under Dave Farber and Gerald Estrin, producing a thesis on network protocols. He was at UCLA at the same time as Vint Cerf, co-inventor of TCP/IP and Steve Crocker, originator of the RFC process and fellow internet innovator. From 1977 Postel was at the Information Science Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California, and in 1983 he and a fellow ISI engineer Paul Mockapetris, along with Craig Partridge of BBN Corp (now part of GTE Corp) developed the DNS, which has proved scalable enough to still be in use today. That year Postel was also a founding member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the first individual member of the Internet Society – he eventually became a trustee in 1996. In 1988 he founded IANA, to which the IP numbering work he had pioneered at ISI gradually passed. A conservative and apparently stubborn man, Postel declined to get publicly involved in the geo-politics that engulfed the DNS and the IANA in particular in the last two years, but it took up so much of his time that he apparently had not been able to do any other research work done over the past 12 months. Vint Cerf said in a tribute statement to Postel, he had been our rock, the foundation on which our every web search and email was built. His death hit a lot of people hard – even those who had never met him – probably not so much because of his personality, or even the depth of his technical achievements, but because of the institution he represented – the so-called ‘internet old guard’ – and the way things were done on the net before commercial interests became heavily involved. The Internet Society is creating a Dr Jonathan B. Postel service award in his honor and many sites on the web have turned their background black as a mark of respect.