For those of you who didn't know...


> Net Mourns Passing of Giant
> by James Glave
> 
> 10:24 p.m.  18.Oct.98.PDT
> Tributes and eulogies poured over the Net this weekend as friends and
> colleagues mourned the passing of Jon Postel, the "father of the
> Internet." He died late Friday at age 55, from complications following
> cardiac surgery.
> 
> Postel was the director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority,
> the non-profit body that allocates IP addresses. He was also a
> founding member of the Internet Architecture Board, a trustee of the
> Internet Society and the caretaker of the .US domain.
> 
> "He was one of the foundations of why the Internet exists, the
> underlying infrastructure is a tribute to a bunch of selfless people,"
> said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive Project and
> inventor of the WAIS Internet searching scheme.
> 
> "Everyone else was getting rich and these guys were trying to keep
> the infrastructure together," Kahle said.
> 
> Postel survived a heart valve replacement in 1991, but recently that
> valve had begun leaking. He died suddenly while recovering from
> surgery to replace it.
> 
> In recent months, Postel had been at the center of a whirl of
> controversy surrounding the formation of a new Internet government.
> On 2 October, Postel submitted his final proposal for the Internet
> Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to the Clinton
> administration. That new non-profit group is expected to assume
> Postel's former role as the guardian of the Internet's underlying
> infrastructure.
> 
> Vint Cerf -- co-author of the Internet Protocol, chairman of the
> Internet Society and a colleague and friend of Postel -- posted a
> moving tribute to Postel to mailing lists.
> 
> In the tribute, Cerf pledged to establish the Jonathan B. Postel
> Service Award, posthumously declaring Postel its first recipient.
> 
> Members of the networking and domain name community reacted to
> the news of Postel's death with shock and sorrow.
> 
> "Humanity lost a defender today," wrote Paul Vixie, a consultant,
> engineer and creator of the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, in an
> email.
> 
> "Against the squalid backdrop of human nature one man tested his
> mettle against the forces of chaos and entropy, without regard for his
> own personal safety, and gave our civilization some extra time to get
> itself organized before advancing along the track of history," Vixie
> said.
> 
> "Jon Postel's passing is a loss of extraordinary proportions," wrote Ken
> 
> Stubbs, the chairman of the Internet Council of Registrars. "His vision
> of a world drawn together through a vast common communications
> network has become a reality, and his genius and leadership were the
> key to its realization."
> 
> Others remembered Postel's altruism:
> 
> "Jon's contributions ushered the Internet through a long series of very
> important and difficult decisions," said Bill Norton, former chair of
> the
> North American Network Operators' Group and a personal friend of
> Postel.
> 
> "He has worked for Information Sciences Institute, solely for the good
> of the Internet, for as long as I have known him."
> 
> "Jon was a man of great integrity," said Norton, a friend of Postel and
> colleague who had worked with him on the Routing Arbiter Project
> since 1994. "He was not swayed by the hype and monetary interests
> that [have more recently] driven the Internet."
> 
> Tara Lemmey, an online privacy advocate, said that Postel worked in
> the background, out of the limelight, and that many now take his work
> for granted.
> 
> "He was really nice and he really got it," said Lemmey, who had been
> consulting closely with Postel on the future of the .us top-level
> domain, which Postel managed as part of his responsibilities at the
> Information Sciences Institute.
> 
> "He had great ethics and a really sincere sense about the community.
> He was really trying to come up with the right solution," said Lemmey.
> 
> "There is a whole group of first-generation Internet pioneers that are
> all like that, and they are really wonderful. It is all about getting
> information to people and making the Internet a better place. It is
> really sad."
> 
> One network administrator proposed that all Web sites should change
> their background colors to black in honor of Postel's passing.
> 
> "When Marconi died, the entire world observed two minutes radio
> silence," wrote Nigel Roberts, administrator of the Channel Islands
> Domain Name Registry on a mailing list devoted to the future of
> Internet governance.
> 
> "Jon Postel's contributions to worldwide communications are every bit
> the equal of Marconi and I feel [turning our site black] is the least
> [I]
> could do," wrote Roberts.
> 
> The Network Information Center for the Chilean country code domain
> has also turned its page black, and others around the world are
> expected to follow suit in tribute.
>