Happy 40th anniversary RFC 791!

Wed Sep 1 19:26:41 UTC 2021

I still have a slew on Lantronix terminal servers :)

-mel via cell

> On Sep 1, 2021, at 11:57 AM, Michael Thomas <mike at mtcc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 9/1/21 11:42 AM, Mel Beckman wrote:
>> For anyone unaware, Jon Postel, a good friend and mentor to many of us at the dawn of the Internet, was the primary editor of this landmark document.
>> 
>> Those were the days we thought ARPAnet would never be allowed to go commercial. Thanks to Jon’s tireless campaigning (among others), not to mention meticulous documentation, it did.
>> 
>> He was taken from us too soon.
>> 
>> https://www.ietfjournal.org/in-memory-of-jon-postel/
>> 
> RFC 791 and 793 are remarkably easy to read and follow what's going on. And that's not just hindsight speaking. We implemented both a few years later purely from the RFC's with no connection to anybody else and when we actually had kit that was connected to the Internet it just worked. One of the most remarkable things in my life was that I wrote debugger for the OS I wrote for the Lantronix terminal servers which I ended up remotely debugging in New Zealand. That was just mind blowing. Of course you'd call that a backdoor these days but they were very happy that I could figure out what was going on.
> 
> I never had the pleasure of meeting Jon, though I saw him at IETF meetings.
> 
> Mike
>