| "RIP Jon." In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California Today, a curious student trying to learn about the internet would probably end up reading stuff written by "Big Tech" and/or academics who have financial relationships with these or other so-called "tech" companies I remember Postel and one other person, perhaps at SRI, I forget her name, had a plan for these sort of hierarchical geographical domainnames. I recall it was _not_ commercial in nature. It "seemed like" Postel saw the internet, including DNS, as a public service. Needless to say, any such non-commercial vision was not realised ICANN DNS became a money grab If Postel had survived to today, would he have sold out like so many of his peers I like to pretend he would not but I have no idea |
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt
If so, the other person was Ann W Cooper
AFAIK Cooper was never at SRI, but Postel was at one time
Putting aside the inaccurate memory, the point I wish to make as an ordinary computer user reading about the internet is that Postel wrote about the internet as a _public resource_. Check out the tone of this random Postel RFC, for example
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt
Postel received a PhD in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA and, apparently, he was a _two-finger typist_ who preferred handwritten slides over PowerPoint and used monochrome logos instead of color (I find this interesting; I'm not suggesting anyone else would)
Joyce K Reynolds, who co-authored some of the most important RFCs with Postel on protocols, was a social sciences major (another factoid I find interesting)