Jon Postel - Career

Career

Postel attended Van Nuys High School, and then UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.A. (1968) in Engineering. He then went on to complete there his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974, with Dave Farber as his thesis advisor.

While at UCLA, he was involved in early work on the ARPANET. He worked briefly at Mitre Corporation, then helped set up the Network Information Center at SRI. In March 1977 he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, where he spent the rest of his career. Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. He wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.

Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.

All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division ("Division 7") of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.