Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 13:04:10 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Shaw <jshaw@insync.net> Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu
He was the author of many RFC's on how to make the Internet a better place.
It's obvious that we need to educate lots of folks on where the Internet came from. Too many people don't know who Jon was and what his impact on the net was. To say the least, Jon did a LOT more than write RFCs, though he did lots of that, too. Jon was one of the folks who was there at the birth of the Internet. If he was not a "father of the Internet", he was certainly one of its earliest tutors. Among other things, Jon was the keeper of RFCs and Internet numbers. If you had a new protocol or record type or anything else that needed a unique identifier, Jon was who you needed to talk to. He was the founder of the Internet Address and Naming Authority (IANA) and he did the top-level allocation of IP addresses and domain names. He (along with the indefatigable Joyce Reynolds) edited and assigned numbers to RFCs. And, since these functions did not exist before the start of the Internet, he invented the whole thing from scratch. I don't have the time to go over all of Jon's contributions to the Internet and am certainly not aware of all of them, but I feel very safe in saying that without Jon the Internet would be a very different "place" today...and I as good a place, either. R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634