Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 14:37:50 -0700
From: pagre@communication.ucsd.edu (Phil Agre)
To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" <rre@lists.gseis.ucla.edu>
Subject: [RRE]another message on Jon Postel


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Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 18:50:23 +0800
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
To: A Malaysian Journal <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Subject: AMJ: Changing the world quietly

(18 October 1998)  A Malasyian Journal:  Changing the world quietly


[ (C)  Copyright 1998, D. Crocker, Brandenburg Consulting               ] 
[ A series of notes on living and working in Malaysia, during Jackie's  ] 
[ Fulbright Fellowship to Universiti Putra Malaysia, near Kuala Lumpur. ] 
[ Copies may be freely distributed, but must retain this preamble.      ] 
[ To (un)subscribe, send me a note.  /Dave <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>   ]


More than anything, these notes concern lessons in perspective this year.
I've just had an unexpected and upsetting one and hope you will not mind my
exploring it with you:

Jackie and I are visiting Sarawak this weekend.  It is the southern of the
two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo.  A little over one year ago,
we visited the northern state, Sabah, and I was confronted with the reality
of an undeniably changed world.  In the U.S., we still think of Borneo in
terms of head hunters in the jungles.  Indeed, Jackie works with a
professor from the Iban tribe in Borneo and he says that his
great-grandfather did hunt heads, as did all of the warriors in those days.
 In fact you could not get married unless you had some heads to show as
proof of your bravery.

However what we see now and saw a year ago, are modern towns with the usual
conveniences.  More astonishing, to me, was that the conveniences included
a "cybercafe" for Internet access.  The fact of global access, reaching all
the way to the "wilds" of Borneo, brought home to me, last year, just how
profound the effect of the Internet is.  I was reminded of that fact again,
here in Sarawack, when I received news of the death of one of the
Internet's true pioneers, Jon Postel.

Few of us get to participate in activities that really do change the world.
 Fewer still can be counted as principal contributors.  For the Internet, a
fair number of people have been put forward as pioneers, some deserving of
the label and some not.  All of the ones being touted enjoy the limelight.
Jon was a notable exception.  He only reached the public eye recently and
he never sought or enjoyed it.  For twenty-five years, he worked to help
the community rather than garner recognition.  Most of his effort was in
doing administrative "scut" work, things that no one else was interested
in, but that needed doing.  So he administered the technical publications
series, he administered assignment of registration values for technical
protocols, he administered assignment of Internet addresses and Internet
names, and he administered operation of the servers that map names to
addresses.

There is no glory in doing administration and operations.  Quite the
opposite.  People notice when it is done badly but rarely offer praise when
it is done well.  People in administrative positions often become petty
bureaucrats.  Since there is so little reward in the job, they artificially
make it a base of power.  So it has confused some who heard Jon referred to
as the Internet numbers "czar".  They did not realize that the community
imparted the title to Jon out of affection and deep appreciation for his
having brought order to essential infrastructure services.  In particular
the community used that term in full knowledge that Jon took his position
as a trust, rather than as an opportunity for personal power.  We always
knew that his views came from legitimate beliefs and we never had to worry
that he was somehow considering political or personal advantage.  We might
not agree with him, but we always knew was driven first by a concern that
the right thing be done.  

All this might give you the wrong idea about Jon.  I was not a close
friend, so I cannot claim to have known him well, only long.  But he was
entirely human.  I certainly knew him well enough to find him a pain to
deal with, sometimes, just like anyone else.

To qualify for responsibility over an infrastructure service, one must be
conservative.  Every change is a danger to the stability of operation, so
every change must be resisted.  Jon suited that requirement far better than
some of us would have liked.  In response to most suggestions for change,
Jon's first response was "no".  It took me many years to learn to put an
idea before him and then walk away, rather than to press the arguments in
favor.  If I pressed, he entrenched against.  If, instead, I walked away,
he always thought the issues through carefully and responded
constructively.  For those of us who think that at any moment we know
Ultimate Truth, it is frustrating to have to deal with someone who
approaches things more carefully.  Frustrating, but very helpful.

Jon was part of the student mafia that formed the original Computer Science
department at UCLA.  He went to Van Nuys high school, in the San Fernando
Valley of Los Angeles, with my brother, Vint Cerf, and a number of others
who formed that first team of students in the new field, at UCLA.  It is
easy to think about the professors who create an academic department, but
it is also easy to forget the role of the first students.  In these heady
days of the sixties, this crew happened into the beginnings of a research
project investigating shared access to long-distance data communication,
designed to be robust against failure.  They were inventing the Arpanet,
which became the Internet.  What they did not realize was that they were
also inventing a culture.

I was hired onto that project in 1972, just in time for the first public
demonstration of the Arpanet in Washington, D.C.  The technology had been
under development and testing for 3 years and it was starting to move into
an operational phase, although an experiment of network behavior would
often crash the entire, international system.  There were a number of teams
involved around the country.  Officially the team at UCLA was the "Network
Measurement Center" since the principal investigator was a leader in
queuing theory and one of the research goals in creating the Arpanet tested
was to measure the behavior that the queuing theory work had predicted.
Jon, Vint, and others did participate in that work, but they served a role
which I believe was more important in the long run:  They led efforts to
develop uses for the net, and they created the foundation for an approach
to that development.

I had dropped out of college and this was my first full-time job.  My
brother had introduced me to computers ten years earlier, but I had limited
experience and no formal training.  This is not a particularly good
background for someone joining a high-powered research project funded by
the high-flying Advanced Research Projects Agency.  Yet these folks never
acted condescending or dismissive.  Quite the contrary they were always
open to any efforts to help.  It was the perfect opportunity for real
learning and contribution and I watched it repeated with many others who
joined the team over the next four years.

Jon had the dubious privilege of getting me as an office mate.  One day I
noticed a think-piece that has been distributed by a graduate student at
the University of Hawaii.  It complained about poor performance over the
satellite link to the Arpanet, and suggested a particular approach to
solving it.  I turned to Jon and said that it sounded pretty reasonable to
me and might be worth developing as an "option" to the Telnet terminal
access protocol.  Jon concurred with my assessment.  I said I'd be
interested in giving a shot at the specification if he would help me and he
agreed.  This was my first technical effort and he mentored the process
perfectly, always praising my newest version and then observing a number of
fatal flaws.  His style was so clear and direct that I was convinced he
knew exactly how the protocol should be done but was humoring me through
the learning process.  I had no understanding of the general ignorance
about building network protocols, at that stage of the industry.

Eventually, the specification stabilized and we published it.  A few people
implemented it and then it died away, in spite of his publishing a revision
a bit later.  After a few years I asked Jon about the reason it failed and
he said that it apparently had a fatal flaw which caused client and server
machines to lose synchronization with each other.  Almost no one knows of
this protocol today, but I consider it a superb example of the real
"decision" process of the Internet community.  One person suggested an
idea.  A couple of others fleshed it out.  Still more people tested it.  No
one complained about authority or scope of responsibility, or following a
particular process.  No one worried about egos and power.  The focus was on
the problem and its possible solution.  The problem was serious enough and
the idea appealing enough, to get some people interested in exploring it.
The idea failed, but it failed on its merits.

In the last two years, Jon found himself painfully in the public eye.  Some
of his work had suddenly become quite interesting, primarily because a
decision at the US National Science Foundation made some of the activities
under him worth a lot of money.  This started an astonishing sequence of
geo-politics and public platform-seeking by many people who had no
experience with Internet development, administrations or operations.  The
money begat power, the power begat the politics and the politics begat the
publicity seekers.  Through all of it, Jon focused only and exactly on the
underlying work.  If he had a failing, it was in refusing to engage in the
politics and, perhaps, in failing to institute some changes in his
operation sooner.  Unfortunately these failings led to his being pilloried
by some, with the press all-to-ready to report the dramatic language.

I recently asked Jon whether he was able to get any real work done, now, or
whether he was entirely consumed by the politics which surrounded the
changes to his group's operation.  He admitted that he had not been able to
do any other work for nearly a year.  I wonder how I would feel if I spent
25 years offering a community his kind of public service, only to find
myself attacked so ruthlessly.  

He was given some awards over the last year.  Perhaps in response to the
attacks, the professional community finally acknowledged his contribution
formally.  In spite of this praise, it must have been a serious blow to
Jon, who has always been so modest and so well-intentioned, to be treated
to such attacks.  In 1991 he had heart operation and early this month he
went into the hospital to have another.  It cannot have helped his state of
mind to be under exactly the sort of public pressure that he had always
avoided.  What effect did that pressure have on his ability to recover?

Vint Cerf is again Chair of the Internet Society's Board of Trustees and he
has already pledged that there will be a Jonathan B. Postel Service Award,
given to those who have contributed to the Internet community.  Vint's
announcement came just as I was deciding that we needed some sort of
continuing acknowledgement of Jon's role in developing not just Internet
technology, but Internet culture.  I think the service award is exactly the
right formal monument.

However I also hope that those engaged in the effort to evolve the
organization that Jon built over the last ten years will give him a living,
and more practical, monument.  I hope that they will emulate his commitment
to the community and his focus on constructive, pragmatic evolution,
eschewing personalities and politics, and emphasizing community benefit.  I
hope that as the various factions continue the debate for the evolution of
his work, each participant asks themselves carefully and honestly whether
their contribution is worthy of Jon.

d/

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Dave Crocker                                       Tel: +60 (19) 3299 445
<mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com>             Post Office Box 296, U.P.M.
                                         Serdang, Selangor 43400 MALAYSIA
Brandenburg Consulting                                          
<http://www.brandenburg.com>                       Tel: +1 (408) 246 8253
Fax: +1(408)246 8253              675 Spruce Dr., Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA