Postel Quotes

#1. They have no discipline. They'll still need us."
"Ha!" said Postel. "No discipline? Behold!!!! My cat has written a book! ...And she's published!" - Amok 2015

Fred Barnett

#2. A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there.

Jon Postel

#3. One way to get high speed to the home is over cable systems.

Jon Postel

#4. The world wide web has really been quite spectacular and not something I would have predicted.

Jon Postel

#5. Today's water institutions-the policies and laws, government agencies and planning and engineering practices that shape patterns of water use-are steeped in a supply-side management philosophy no longer appropriate to solving today's water problems.

Sandra Postel

#6. All this stuff was done via FTP but the web has put a really nice user interface on it.

Jon Postel

#7. But as soon as we got that higher speed access to the home there's going to be a tremendous crunch on the backbones for a much higher speed bandwidth. People really ought to be planning for that.

Jon Postel

#8. There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational.

Jon Postel

#9. Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving the use of one computer to measure the performance of another computer.

Jon Postel

#10. The overriding rule, if you want to run a domain, is to be fair.

Jon Postel

#11. If you're in charge of managing domain name space you should treat everybody who asks for a registration the same. Whatever that is - whether it's nice or ugly or whatever - just be fair, treat them all the same.

Jon Postel

#12. Pervasive depletion and overuse of water supplies, the high capital cost of new large water projects, rising pumping costs and worsening ecological damage call for a shift in the way water is valued, used and managed.

Sandra Postel

#13. Being in the limelight has its minuses.

Jon Postel

#14. Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

Jon Postel

#15. Corporate documents, like football game plans, are not easily drafted in a stadium, with thousands of very interested fans participating, each with their own red pencil, trying to reach a consensus on every word.

Jon Postel

#16. Reforesting the earth is possible, given a human touch.

Sandra Postel

#17. In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

Jon Postel

#18. I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet.

Jon Postel

#19. We have been quick to assume rights to use water but slow to recognize obligations to preserve and protect it ... In short, we need a water ethic-a guide to right conduct in the face of complex decisions about natural systems we do not and cannot fully understand.

Sandra Postel

#20. Another aspect of our work is multimedia teleconferencing.

Jon Postel

#21. For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports.

Sandra Postel

#22. But I do have a computer at home and a pretty good ISDN connection.

Jon Postel

#23. I also administer the Internet Assigned Names Authority, which is the central coordinator for the Internet address space, domain names and Internet protocol conventions essential to the use and operation of the Internet.

Jon Postel

#24. Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

Jon Postel

#25. The routers get involved in this and they know that on the path between this router and that router a certain percentage of the bandwidth is reserved to these things and a certain percentage of it is allowed on a first come first served basis.

Jon Postel

#26. Water is the basis of life and the blue arteries of the earth! Everything in the non-marine environment depends on freshwater to survive.

Sandra Postel

#27. Water is finite and we have not done a great job of managing it in the past.

Sandra Postel

#28. The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.

Jon Postel

#29. TCP works very hard to get the data delivered in order without errors and does retransmissions and recoveries and all that kind of stuff which is exactly what you want in a file transfer because so you don't want any errors in your file.

Jon Postel

#30. One of the things that is not so good is that a decision was made long ago about the size of an IP address - 32 bits. At the time it was a number much larger than anyone could imagine ever having that many computers but it turned out to be to small.

Jon Postel

#31. Years ago when you'd go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now most of the people are from companies who are building internet products and care what the standards turn out to be.

Jon Postel

#32. In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.

Jon Postel

#33. I think that audio and video over the internet in the sense of teleconferencing and telephone calls. Maybe we'll actually have picture phone through your work station.

Jon Postel

#34. Group discussion is very valuable; group drafting is less productive.

Jon Postel

#35. Everyone should have ten megabits and then the web will be a wonderful thing.

Jon Postel

#36. That was clearly surprising, interesting - a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it.

Jon Postel

#37. I got involved when I was a graduate student at UCLA when UCLA was the first site on the net.

Jon Postel