JON POSTEL

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Another aspect of our work is multimedia teleconferencing.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Being in the limelight has its minuses.

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.