RFC 1336

Who's Who in the Internet: Biographies of IAB, IESG and IRSG Members

📅 published May 1992, from ietf

Who's Who in the Internet 🌸

okay bestie, this is RFC 1336 and it is literally a who's who of the people keeping the Internet running 💖 It's titled Who's Who in the Internet: Biographies of IAB, IESG and IRSG Members. It's FYI number 9, written by G. Malkin from Xylogics, dated May 1992. It obsoletes RFC 1251, and the header doesn't list anything it updates. It's an FYI, so it's here to inform the Internet community, not to set any standard 🎀

Status of This Memo ✨

This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify any standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited 💅

Abstract 🦋

This FYI RFC contains biographical info about members of the Internet Activities Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). So basically, the people behind the scenes get their moment 👑

Table of Contents 📚

   1. Introduction.................................................... 2
   2. Acknowledgements................................................ 2
   3. Request for Biographies......................................... 2
   4. Biographies
      4.1  Philip Almquist............................................ 3
      4.2  Robert Braden.............................................. 4
      4.3  Hans-Werner Braun.......................................... 6
      4.4  Ross Callon................................................10
      4.5  Vinton Cerf................................................11
      4.6  Noel Chiappa...............................................13
      4.7  A. Lyman Chapin............................................14
      4.8  David Clark................................................15
      4.9  Stephen Crocker............................................15
      4.10 James R. Davin.............................................18
      4.11 Deborah Estrin.............................................18
      4.12 Russell Hobby..............................................20
      4.13 Christian Huitema..........................................20
      4.14 Erik Huizer................................................21
      4.15 Stephen Kent...............................................23
      4.16 Anthony G. Lauck...........................................23
      4.17 Barry Leiner...............................................25
      4.18 Daniel C. Lynch............................................26
      4.19 David M. Piscitello........................................27
      4.20 Jonathan B. Postel.........................................29
      4.21 Joyce K. Reynolds..........................................30
      4.22 Michael Schwartz...........................................31
      4.23 Bernhard Stockman..........................................32
      4.24 Gregory Vaudreuil..........................................32
   5. Security Considerations.........................................33
   6. Author's Address................................................33

1. Introduction 🌈

okay so the Internet is HUGE. There are thousands of networks, tens of thousands of host machines, and hundreds of thousands of users 😭 Keeping the resources and protocols that make all of this possible takes a serious amount of effort. Sites might have people who get paid to manage their hardware and software, but the infrastructure of the Internet is actually run by volunteers who give up big chunks of their valuable time to keep everyone connected 🫶

Hundreds of people show up to the three IETF meetings every year. They represent governments, the military, research institutions, educational institutions, and vendors from all over the world. Most of them are volunteers who come to learn and to share what they know ✨ Then there are a few very special people who deserve extra spotlight: the folks on the IAB, IESG, and IRSG. They don't just attend the meetings, they put in extra time to organize them. They're the IETF's link to other standards bodies and to the funding institutions. Without them, the IETF (and honestly the whole Internet) wouldn't be possible 👑

2. Acknowledgements 🎀

Huge thanks to everyone who took the time to write their biographies so the compiler could put them together into this FYI RFC 💖 Special shoutout to Joyce K. Reynolds (whose biography is in here too!) for helping create the biography request message and for being such a good sounding board 🫶

3. Request for Biographies 💌

In mid-February 1991, the compiler sent the following message to the members of the IAB, IESG and IRSG. The responses to that message are what got compiled into this FYI RFC, so this is the request that started it all 🍓

The ARPANET is 20 years old.  The next meeting of the IETF in St.
Louis this coming March will be the 20th plenary.  It is a good
time to credit the people who help make the Internet possible.  I
am sending this request to the current members of the IAB, the
IRSG, and the IESG.  At some future time, I would like to expand
the number of people to be included.  For now, however, I am
limiting inclusion to members of the groups listed above.

I would like to ask you to submit to me your biography.  I intend
to compile the bios submitted into an FYI RFC to be published
before the next IETF meeting.  In order to maintain some
consistency, I would like to have the bios contain three
paragraphs.  The first paragraph should contain your bio, second
should be your school affiliation & other interests, and the third
should contain your opinion of how the Internet has grown.  Of
course, if there is anything else you would like to say, please
feel free.  The object is to let the very large user community
know about the people who give them what they have.

4. Biographies 🦋

okay this is the good part 🧚 The biographies are in alphabetical order. The contents have not been edited, only the formatting has been changed, so every bio is exactly as its person wrote it (pure main character energy) 💜

Okay bestie, so for me, being part of building the ARPAnet and the Internet protocols has been SO exciting 🌈 One big reason it worked, I really think, is that there were a ton of super brilliant people all pulling in more or less the same direction, guided by some very wise folks at the funding agency 🧚 That gave us a whole community of network researchers who genuinely believed collaboration beats competition. I honestly don't think any other model would've gotten us to where we are today 💜 This world view is still alive in the IAB, and you can see it in the informal vibe of the IAB, IETF, and IRTF.

Buuut 😬 with all the growth and success (plus some subtle policy shifts in Washington), the main mode might be drifting toward competition, both commercial and academic. If you want to build protocols in a commercially competitive world, you need elaborate committee structures and rules 📋 Then the action moves to the big companies, and small companies and universities get left in the dust. In an academically competitive world, you don't really develop any (useful) protocols. Instead you get 6 different protocols for the same objective, each with its own research paper, and the paper is the "real" output 📄 That's super efficient at producing research papers, but it may not create the kind of intellectual consensus you need for good, useful communication protocols 🫠

Being an IAB member is sometimes SO frustrating 😭 We've been painfully aware of the Internet's scaling problems for a while now, and since 1982 we've lived through a series of mini-disasters as various limits got exceeded 💀 We keep saying that "getting big" is probably a more urgent (and maybe more difficult) research problem than "getting fast," but it's really hard to convince people to launch the kind of research program we think is needed to figure out how to handle Internet growth 🥲

It's also really hard to figure out when the exponential growth will stop, or whether, if ever, the fundamental architectural model of the Internet will get so out of kilter with reality that it stops being useful. Ask me again in ten years ✨

4.3 Hans-Werner Braun, IAB Member 🎀

Hans-Werner Braun joined the San Diego Supercomputer Center as a Principal Scientist in January 1991 🌸 His first big job there was being Co-Principal Investigator of, and an Executive Committee member on, the CASA gigabit network research project, where he's working on networking efforts that go way beyond today's computer networking infrastructure problems 🚀 Between April 1983 and January 1991 he was at the University of Michigan, focused on operational infrastructure for the Merit Computer Network and the University of Michigan's Information Technology Division. He started out with networking infrastructure inside the State of Michigan, then began investigating TCP/IP protocols and got really involved in the early stages of the NSFNET networking efforts 🦋 He was Principal Investigator on the NSFNET backbone project from the moment the NSFNET award went to Merit in November 1987, and he managed Merit's Internet Engineering group. Between April 1978 and April 1983, Hans-Werner Braun worked at the Regional Computing Center of the University of Cologne in West Germany, handling network engineering for the regional and local network 🍓

In March 1978 Hans-Werner Braun graduated in West Germany and earned a Diploma in Engineering with a major in Information Processing 🎓 He's a member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and its Special Interest Group on Communications, the Institute of Electrical and Electronical Engineers (IEEE), the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Communications Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science 💅 He was a member of the National Science Foundation's Network Program Advisory Group (NPAG), and especially its Technical Committee (NPAG-TC), between November 1986 and late 1987, when the NPAG got resolved 🔥 He also chaired the Technical Committee of the National Science Foundation's Network Program Advisory Group (NPAG-TC) starting in February 1987. Before the organizational change of the JvNCnet, he took part in the JvNCnet Network Technical Advisory Committee (NTAC) of the John von Neumann National Supercomputer Center. While working as Principal Investigator on the NSFNET project at Merit, he chaired the NSFNET Network Technical Committee, which was created to help Merit with the NSFNET project 🤝 Hans-Werner Braun has been a member of the Engineering Planning Group of the Federal Networking Council (FEPG) since its beginnings in early 1989, and a member of the Internet Activities Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Task Force. He had participated in an earlier, informal version of the Internet Engineering Steering Group and in the then-existing Internet Architecture Task Force 🌈 While at Merit, Hans-Werner Braun was also Principal Investigator on NSF projects for the "Implementation and Management of Improved Connectivity Between NSFNET and CA*net" and for "Coordinating Routing for the NSFNET." The latter was during the era of the old 56kbps NSFNET backbone network, which he was super intimately involved with 💜

The growth of the Internet can be measured in lots of ways, and I can only try to find some examples 📈

Network number counts 🔢 There were days when being "connected to net 10" was the Greatest Thing Ever! Back when the Internet just consisted of a few networks centered around the ARPAnet, growing above 100 network numbers seemed excessive 😳 Today's number of networks in the global infrastructure exceeds 2000 connected networks, and there are many more if isolated network islands get included.
Traffic growth 🚦 The Internet has had a dramatic increase in traffic over the last few years. The NSFNET backbone is a good example here: in August 1988 about 194 million packets got injected into the network, which had increased to about 396 million packets per month by the end of the year, and then reached about 4.8 billion packets in December 1990. January 1991 yielded close to 5.9 billion packets sent into the NSFNET backbone 🤯
Internet Engineering Task Force participation 🫶 The early IETF, after it spun off from the old GADS, included about 20 or so people. I remember a meeting a few people had with Mike Corrigan several years ago. Mike chaired the IETF before Phill Gross became chair, and the discussion was about permitting the "NSFNET crowd" to join the IETF. Mike finally agreed, and the IETF started to explode in size, now including many working groups and several hundred members, including vendors and phone companies 🎉
International infrastructure 🌍 At some point the Internet was centered around the US, with very little international connectivity. The international connectivity was for network research purposes, just like the US domestic component was at that point. Today's Internet stretches to so many countries that it can be considered close to global in scope, especially as more and more international connections, and Internet infrastructure within other countries, keep happening ✈️
References in trade journals 📰 Many trade journals just a year or two ago had close to no mention of the Internet. Today, references to the Internet appear in many journals and press releases from a variety of places 🗞️
Articles in professional papers 📚 Publications like ACM SIGCOMM show increased interest in Internet-related professional papers compared to a few years ago. Also, the publication rate of the Request For Comments (RFC) series is quite impressive 🤩
Congressional and Senatorial visibility 🏛️ A few years ago the Internet was "just a research project." Today's dramatically increased visibility, a result of the Internet's success, lets Congress as well as Senators play lead roles in pushing the National Research and Education Network (NREN) agenda forward, which the executive branch also fosters. In the context of the US federal government, though, the real credit should go to DARPA 👑 It started prototyping advanced networking about twenty years ago, which led to the Internet, and over time it opened things up more and more to the science and research community, until more operational efforts could move the network to a real infrastructure supporting science, research and education at large. This really allowed NSF to make NSFNET happen 💖
Funding 💰 The Internet's funding initially consisted of DARPA efforts. Agencies like NSF, NASA, DOE and others started making major contributions later. Industrial participation helped move the network forward as well. Very major investments have been made by campuses and research institutions to create local infrastructure. Operational infrastructure comes at a high cost, especially if ubiquity, robustness and high performance are required 🧾
Research and continued development

Okay so the Internet has glowed up so much 🌈 It went from a research playground to an operational infrastructure that supports research, science and education everywhere. For tons of people it's where their day-to-day work actually happens 💻 But at its current level of technology, the whole thing still runs on a culture of people cooperating in a mostly non-competitive vibe, which is a LOT of trust, bestie 🫶 Many times already, things like the size of the routing tables, the amount of traffic, or routing exchange protocols that just can't keep up (to name a few) have broken connectivity and left people stuck mid-work 😭 Global Internet management and problem resolution also make fast recovery from certain incidents way harder 💀 It's unproven that the current tech will survive in a competitive but unregulated environment, with uncoordinated routing policies and global network management being just two of the big issues 🙈

Also, people keep saying the monthly traffic growth numbers wouldn't justify moving to T3 or even gigabit per second networks 🙄 But monthly figures are super macroscopic, so they hide the real drama. Much of the Internet traffic is very bursty, and if you zoom in over fairly short intervals, we've often seen a total onslaught of traffic toward backbone nodes 🌊 Picture specific applications that, maybe in real-time, need an occasional exchange of massive amounts of data. We need to be ready for those to get more widespread once people can use things fancier than Telnet, FTP and SMTP ✨ And honestly? I'm not sure whether the amount of research and development on the Internet has increased over time, or whether it's even kept pace with the general Internet growth (depending on how you define that, lol) 🤷‍♀️ I do not believe the Internet is a finished product at this point in time. There's a LOT of room for further evolution 🦋

4.4. Ross Callon 🌸

Ross Callon is a member of the Distributed Systems Architecture staff at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Littleton Massachusetts 💼 He's working on issues related to OSI -- TCP/IP interoperation and introducing OSI into the Internet. He's the author of the Integrated IS-IS protocol (RFC 1195), and he's worked on scaling routing and addressing to very large Internets. He's also co-author of the guidelines for allocation of NSAP addresses in the Internet (RFC 1237) 🧠

Before joining DEC, Mr. Callon was at Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he worked on OSI Standards, Network Management, Routing Protocols and other router-related issues 🛠️

Mr. Callon got a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Master of Science degree in Operations Research from Stanford University 🎓

During eleven years of involvement with the Internet community, it's been so exciting to watch data communications go from a relatively obscure technology to something in widespread everyday use 📈 Looking ahead, he's interested in a transition to a world-wide multi-protocol Internet. That means scaling to several orders of magnitude larger than today's Internet, and putting a bigger focus on reliability and ease of use 💅 His probably biggest challenge is creating a system that "ordinary people" can use with the reliability and ease of the current telephone system 📞✨

4.5. Dr. Vinton Cerf, IAB Member 🚀

Career timeline, because this man's résumé is ICONIC:

1960-1965: summer jobs with various divisions of North American Aviation (Now Rockwell International): Rocketdyne, Atomics International, Autonetics, Space and Information Systems Division.
1965-1967: systems engineer at IBM, Los Angeles Data Center. Ran and maintained the QUIKTRAN interactive, on-line Fortran service.
1967-1972: various programming positions at UCLA, largely involved with ARPANET protocol development, plus the network measurement center and computer performance measurements.
1972-1976: Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Did research on networking and developed TCP/IP protocols for internetting under a DARPA research grant.
1976-1982: Program Manager and Principal Scientist at the Information Processing Techniques Office, DARPA. Managed the Internetting, Packet Technology and Network Security programs.
1982-1986: Vice President of Engineering at MCI Digital Information Services Company. Developed the MCI Mail system.
1986-present: Vice President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Responsible for Internet, Digital Library and Electronic Mail system interconnection research programs.

Degrees and extra flex: Stanford University, 1965 (math) B.S. UCLA, 1970, 1972 (computer science) M.S. and Ph.D. 🎓

Community stuff: 1972-1976 founding chairman of the International Network Working Group (INWG), which became IFIP Working Group 6.1 🌍 1979-1982 ex officio member of ICCB (predecessor to the Internet Activities Board), member of the IAB from 1986-1989 and chairman from 1989-1991 👑 1967-present member of ACM; chairman of LA SIGART 1968-1969; chairman ACM SIGCOMM 1987-1991; at-large member ACM Council, 1991-1993 💜 1972-present member of Sigma Xi 🔬 1977-present member of IEEE; Fellow, 1988 ⭐

The Internet started as a focused DARPA research effort to link computers across multiple, internally diverse packet networks 🔗 This tech evolved through 4 versions, got demoed on ARPANET, mobile packet radio nets, the Atlantic SATNET and the at-sea MATNET, and that set the stage for formally mandating the TCP/IP protocols for use on ARPANET and other DoD systems in 1983 🎖️ By the mid-1980's, a whole market had popped up for software and hardware supporting these protocols. That was largely triggered by Ethernet and other LAN phenomena, plus the rapid spread of UNIX-based systems that included TCP/IP in the standard release package 💥 While vendors got super interested, government agencies beyond DoD started applying the tech to their own needs. That eventually led to the Federal Research Internet Coordinating Committee, which has since evolved into the Federal Networking Council, in the U.S. 🇺🇸

Meanwhile, TCP/IP was growing just as fast outside the US: in Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Rim, Eurasia, Australia, South and Central America and, to a limited extent, Africa 🌏 Going international spawned new organizational hubs like the Coordinating Committee for International Research Networking (CCIRN), plus heavy interest in commercial IP services (e.g., in Finland, the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere) 🌐

The Internet also became the basis for a proposed National Research and Education Network (NREN) in the U.S. 🏫 Its electronic messaging system got linked to the major U.S. commercial email carriers and other big private email services like Bitnet (in the US, EARN in Europe), plus UUNET (in the U.S.) and EUNET (in Europe) 📧 Bitnet and the UUCP-based systems are international in scope and complement the Internet in terms of email connectivity 💌

With OSI capability (in the form of CLNP) introduced into important parts of the Internet, like the NSFNET backbone and selected intermediate level networks, a path opened up to support multiple protocol suites in the Internet 🛤️ Lots of vendor routers/gateways now support TCP/IP, OSI and a variety of vendor-specific protocols in a common network environment 🔀

In the U.S., regional Bell Operating Company carriers were planning to introduce Switched Multimegabit Data Services and Frame Relay services, which can support TCP/IP and other Internet protocols 📡 On the research side, DARPA and the NSF were backing a major gigabit speed networking initiative, which the NREN is aimed toward ⚡

The Internet is a grand collaboration of over 5000 networks, involving millions of users, hundreds of thousands of hosts and dozens of countries around the world 🌎 It may well do for computers what the telephone system has done for people: provide a means of international interchange of information that's blind to nationality, proprietary interests and hardware platform specifics 🦋💖

4.6. Noel Chiappa, IETF Internet Area Co-director 🧚

Noel Chiappa is currently an independent inventor working in computer networks and system software 💡 His principal occupation, though, is serving as the Internet Area Co-director for the Internet Engineering Steering Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force 👑

His primary current research interest is routing and addressing architectures for very large scale (globally ubiquitous and larger) internetworks. He's generally interested in the problems of the packet layer of internetworking, i.e., everything involved in getting traffic from one host to another anywhere in the internetwork 🛰️ For a 'spare time amusement' project, he's also writing a C compiler with many novel features intended for large programming projects with lots of source and header files 🖥️✨

He's been a member of the TCP/IP Working Group and its successors (up to the IETF) since 1977 🕰️ He was on the Research Staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1977-1982 and 1984-1986. While at MIT he worked on packet switching and local area networks, and he was responsible for the conception of the multi-protocol backbone and the multi-protocol router 🌟 After leaving MIT, he worked with a number of companies, including Proteon, to bring networking products based on MIT work to the public 📦 He attended Phillips Andover Academy and MIT, and he was born and bred in Bermuda 🏝️🌺

His outside interests include studying and collecting antique racing cars (mostly Lotuses, obviously 💅), reading political and military history and biographies, landscape gardening (Japanese style especially 🌸), and studying Oriental rugs (Turkoman tribal rugs are his fave) and Oriental antiques (Japanese lacquerware and Chinese archaic jades 💜).

4.7. A. Lyman Chapin, IAB Chairman

Lyman Chapin graduated from Cornell University in 1973 with a B.A. in Mathematics, then spent the next two years writing COBOL applications for Systems & Programs (NZ) Ltd. in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. After a year travelling in Australia and Asia, he joined the newly-formed Networking group at Data General Corporation in 1977. At DG he worked on software for distributed resource management (operating-system embedded RPC), distributed database management, X.25-based local and wide-area networks, and OSI-based transport, internetwork, and routing functions for DG's open-system products. In 1987 he formed the Distributed Systems Architecture group, where he was responsible for developing DG's Distributed Application Architecture (DAA) and specifying the directory and management services of DAA. 🦋

He moved to Bolt, Beranek & Newman in 1990 as Chief Network Architect in BBN's Communications Division, where he consults for the Systems Architecture group and coordinates BBN's open system standards activities. He chairs the ANSI-accredited task group X3S3.3, which is responsible for Network and Transport layer standards, a gig he's had since 1982. He's been chairman of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) since July 1991, and he chairs the Internet Activities Board (IAB), which he's been a member of since 1989. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. 💖

I started out in 1977 working with X.25 networks, and began working on OSI in 1979, first on the architecture (the OSI Reference Model) and then on the transport, internetwork, and routing protocol specifications. It didn't take long to notice the basic irony of OSI standards development: there we were, solemnly anointing international standards for networking, and every single time we needed to send electronic mail or exchange files, we were using the TCP/IP-based Internet! 😭

I've been hunting for ways to fix that anomaly ever since: to inject as much of the proven TCP/IP technology into OSI as possible, and to bring OSI into an ever more pervasive and worldwide Internet. It is, to say the least, a challenge! 🔥

4.8. Dr. David Clark

David Clark works at the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science, where he is a Senior Research Scientist. His current research is about protocols for high speed and very large networks, especially the problems of routing and flow and congestion control. He is also working on integrating video into packet networks. Before that, he developed a new implementation approach for network software, plus an operating system (Swift) to demonstrate the concept. Earlier projects include the token ring LAN and the Multics operating system. He joined the TCP development effort in 1975 and chaired the IAB from 1981 to 1990. He has a continuing interest in protocol performance, and he's also active in computer and communications security. 🧚

David Clark received his BSEE from Swarthmore College in 1966, and his MS and PhD from MIT, with the PhD coming in 1973. He has worked at MIT ever since. 🎀

It is not proper to think of networks as connecting computers. Rather, they connect people, with computers doing the mediating. The great success of the Internet is not technical, but in human impact. Electronic mail may not be a wonderful advance in Computer Science, but it is a whole new way for people to communicate. The continued growth of the Internet is a technical challenge for all of us, but we must never lose sight of where we came from, the great change we have made to the larger computer community, and the great potential we have for future change. 🫶

4.9. Stephen Crocker, IETF Security Area Director

Steve Crocker joined Trusted Information Systems, Inc. in 1986 and is a vice president. He set up TIS' Los Angeles office and ran it until summer 1989, when he moved to the home office in Maryland. At TIS his primary concerns are program verification research and application, integration of cryptography with trusted systems, network security, and new applications for networks and trusted systems. 💅

He was at the Aerospace Corporation from 1981 to 1986 as Director of the Information Sciences Research Office, which later became the Computer Science Laboratory. The research program at Aerospace covered networks, program verification, artificial intelligence, applications of expert systems, and parallel processing.

From 1974 to 1981 he was a researcher at USC's Information Sciences Institute, where he focused mainly on program verification. From 1971 to 1974 he was a program manager at DARPA/IPTO, responsible for research programs in artificial intelligence, automatic programming, speech understanding, and some parts of network research. He also initiated an ambitious but somewhat ill-fated venture called the National Software Works.

From 1968 to 1971 he was a graduate student in the UCLA Computer Science Department. While there he initiated the Network Working Group, arguably the forerunner of the IETF and many related groups around the world, and helped define the original suite of protocols for the Arpanet. He also initiated the Request for Comments (RFC) series. A short description of the events of that era is contained in RFC 1000. 🦋

He was a graduate student in the MIT AI Lab for a year and a half in 1967-68, and an undergraduate at UCLA for a long time before that.

I've watched the Internet grow from its beginning. At UCLA we had the privilege of being the very first on the Arpanet. In those days, several of us dreamed of very high quality intercomputer connections and very rich protocols to knit the computers together. Some of those concepts are still discussed and anticipated today under names like remote visualization and distributed file systems, etc. On the other hand, I would never have imagined that 20 years later we'd have such a plethora of different network technologies. Even more astonishing is the enormous number of independently managed but nonetheless interconnected networks that make up the current network. And somewhat beyond comprehension is that it seems to work 🌈

How will the Internet evolve? I expect to see substantial developments in the following dimensions.

Regularization, internationalization and commercialization. Standards will become even more important than they are now. Implementations of protocols and related mechanisms will become more standard and robust. The relationship between the TCP/IP stack and the OSI stack will be resolved with

The Internet will become a less U.S.-centric and more international operation. Much of the Internet will be operated by commercial concerns on a profit-making basis, thereby opening up the Internet to unrestricted use. The telephone companies, including both the local exchange carriers and the interexchange carriers, will start providing some of the protocol stack other than the point-to-point lines.

Higher and lower bandwidths; great proliferation. I expect T1 connections to become the norm for the types of institutions that are on the Internet now. Higher speeds, including speeds up to a gigabit, will become available. At the same time, I expect a vast expansion of the Internet, reaching into a significant fraction of the schools and businesses in this country and elsewhere in the world. Many of these institutions will be connected at 9600 bits/sec or slower.
More applications. E-mail dominates the Internet, and it's likely to remain the dominant use of the Internet in the future. Nonetheless, I expect an exciting array of other applications to become heavily used, causing a change in the perception of the Internet as primarily a "mail system." Important databases will become available on the Internet, and applications dependent on those databases will flourish. New techniques and tools for collaboration over a network will emerge, including various forms of conferencing and cooperative multi-media document development.
Security. Security will tighten up on the Internet, but not without some (more) pain. Host operating systems will be built, configured, distributed and operated under much tighter constraints than they have been. Firewalls will abound. Encryption will be added to links, routers and various protocol layers. All of this will decrease the utility of the Internet in the short run, but lay the groundwork for broader use eventually. New protocols will emerge that incorporate sound protection but also provide efficient and flexible access control and resource sharing. These will provide the basis for the kind of close-knit applications that motivated the original thinking behind the Arpanet. 🔥

4.10. James R. Davin, IETF Network Management Area Director

James R. Davin currently works in the Advanced Network Architecture group at the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science, where his recent interests center on protocol architecture and congestion control. In the past he worked on router development at Proteon, Incorporated, where much of his work focused on network management. He has also worked at Data General's Research Triangle Park facility on a variety of communications protocols. 🍓

He holds the B.A. from Haverford College and master's degrees in Computer Science and English from Duke University. 🌸

4.11 Dr. Deborah Estrin, IRSG Member ✨

Deborah Estrin is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She got her Ph.D. (1985) in Computer Science and her M.S. (1982) in Technology Policy, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her B.S. (1980) is from U.C. Berkeley. In 1987 Estrin won the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award for her research in network interconnection and security. Her research focuses on designing network and routing protocols for very large, global networks 🌍

Deborah has been studying internetwork security and routing for almost 10 years. As chairperson of the IAB's Autonomous Networks Research Group, she coordinated and wrote some of the earliest discussions and evaluations of mechanisms for policy-routing. She's also one of the leading architects of the Inter-Domain Policy Routing (IDPR) protocols, working with other members of the IETF IDPR Working Group. As part of the IDPR effort, Estrin directed the implementation of IDPR setup, packet forwarding, and route synthesis implementations. She keeps collaborating extensively with BBN and other IDPR developers 🧚

Before her policy routing work, Dr. Estrin totally refuted the idea that host-security alone was enough, and developed mechanisms (i.e., the Visa Protocol) for border routers to flexibly and securely protect intra-domain network resources without modifying the IP protocol itself. Estrin's current research interests are inter-domain routing for global internets, and adaptive routing to support new high-speed, delay-sensitive services 💜

Estrin is a member of the National Science Foundation's NSFNET technical advisory committee and of the OTA Information Technology and Research Assessment Advisory Panel. Dr. Estrin is co-Editor of the Journal of Internetworking Research and Experience and has acted as a reviewer and program committee member for several IEEE and ACM journals and conferences (e.g., SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, Security and Privacy). She is a member of IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and CPSR 👑

For the past few years I've gotten to collaborate on designing network and routing protocols for global internetworks linking a massive number of domains (e.g., tens of thousands of networks and millions of hosts). Scaling like that means not just more routers and end-systems, but also more heterogeneity, both technical and administrative. That makes security, resource control, and usage feedback (incentives to encourage users to use the network efficiently) super important in protocol design 🔥

Like, the technical community has been so focused on high speed, but large-scale systems are where we're most lacking in research results and design methods and tools 😭

4.12 Russell Hobby, IETF Applications Area Director 🎀

Russ Hobby got a B.S. in Chemistry (1975) and an M.S. in Computing Sciences (1981) from the University of California, Davis, where he currently works as Director of Advanced Network Applications in Network Technology. He also represents UC Davis as a founding member of the Bay Area Regional Research Network (BARRNet). He formed and now chairs the California Internet Federation, a forum for coordinating educational and research networks in California. He's also the Area Director for Applications in the Internet Engineering Task Force and a member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group 🧠

Russ is responsible for all aspects of campus networking, including network design, implementation, and operation. UC Davis has also been instrumental in developing new network protocols and their prototype implementations, in particular the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP). UC Davis has been super active in using networking for students from kindergarten through community colleges, and has had the Davis High School on the Internet since 1989. Together with the City of Davis, UC Davis is planning a community network using ISDN to bring networking into the residences in Davis, for university network connection, high school and library resource access, telecommuting, and electronic democracy 🍓

I've watched the Internet grow into a worldwide utility, but ngl it's still missing the kinds of applications that could make use of its full potential 🥺 I believe it's time to look at the network from the users' side and think about the functionality they actually want. We need new applications for information storage and retrieval, personal and group communications, and coordinated computer resources. As I always say, "Networks aren't just for computer nerds anymore!" 💅

4.13 Dr. Christian Huitema, IAB Member 🦋

Christian Huitema has spent several years researching network protocols and network applications. He's now at INRIA in Sophia-Antipolis, where he leads the research project "RODEO", whose objective is defining and experimenting with communication protocols for very high speed networks, at one Gbit/s or more. That includes studying high speed transmission control protocols, their parameterization, and their insertion in the operating systems, plus the study of synchronization functions and the management of data transparency between heterogeneous systems. The work is done in cooperation with industrial partners and takes into account the evolution of communication standards 🌸

Previously, he took part in the NADIR project, investigating computer usage of telecommunication satellites, and in OSI developments in the GIPSI project for the SM90 work station, including one of the earliest X.400 systems. He also joined the ESPRIT project THORN, which is set to provide one of the first X.500 conformant directory systems 🧚

Christian Huitema graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1975, and passed his doctorate at the University of Paris VI in 1985 🎓

The various projects which followed the "Cyclades" network in France were following the developments of the Arpanet and then the Internet very closely. However, the first linkage was established in the early 80's through mail connections. I was directly involved in setting up the first direct TCP-IP connection between France and the Internet (actually, NSFNET), which was first experimented with in 1987 and became operational in 1988. This interconnection, together with parallel actions in the Nordic countries of Europe, at CERN and through the EUNET association, was certainly influential in the development of TCP/IP internetting in Europe ✨

The rapid growth of the Internet here is indicative both of the perceived needs and of the future. Researchers from universities, non-profit and industrial organizations are eager to communicate, and new applications are being developed which will enable them to interact more and more closely.. and will pose the networking challenge of realizing a very large, very powerful Internet 🌈

4.14 Erik Huizer, IETF OSI Area Co-director 🌷

Erik Huizer graduated from Delft University of Technology with an MSc. in Material Science in 1983. He spent the next four years in the same university building a computerised creep measurement system for metallic glasses, including a small local network for datatransport to a dataprocessing system. After getting his PhD, he refused military service on grounds of conscience (possible under Dutch law). He was then charged with doing 18 months of civil service instead, in the computing center of the Ministry of Transport, department of Building and Roads 🫶

In those 18 months he became project manager charged with implementing a Videotex system. He was also charged with investigating TCP/IP as a possible LAN protocol and X.400 as a possible E-mail protocol. In 1988 he was discharged and started working for SURFnet BV (the not-for-profit company that runs SURFnet), the Dutch academic and research network. At SURFnet he is the main person responsible for development of the network 🔥

Among the things he worked on are introducing TCP/IP and associated protocols into SURFnet, connecting SURFnet to the Internet, introducing an X.400 MHS infrastructure, and a X.500 Directory Services pilot. He has been active in RARE WG1 on Message Handling Services from 1988 to 1992. Also, in 1988 he joined RARE WG3 on Directory Services and User Support and Information Services, which he chaired from 1990 to 1992 👑

He has been one of the initiators of the new RARE WG structure that was installed in May 1992, and that is now managed by the Rare Technical Committee, of which he is a member. He joined the IESG in November 1991 as area co-director of the OSI Integration area. He is married and lives with his wife in Utrecht, The Netherlands 💖

I ran into the Internet in 1988, and it immediately changed how I thought about networking 🌐 Working for a European service provider, I was basically a playball getting tossed between the Funding Agencies (OSI) and the users (as long as it works) 🏐😭 I had to be soft enough not to hurt anyone but hard enough to change things in a manageable way. So now I can see benefits in OSI and in the Internet protocol suite, and I want users to get the best of both worlds 🫶 After years of fighting in the European camp to make people see the benefits of TCP/IP (I got called an IP-freak lol 💀), joining the IETF was a refreshing change, because now I'm battling for OSI and getting called an OSI-addict 🙈 Besides the OSI integration into the Internet, I've set myself a second, possibly even heavier mission: moving the Internet and its associated structures like IETF, IRTF, IESG, IAB, etc. toward a more global structure that reflects how far the Internet has spread outside North America 🌍✨

4.15 Dr. Stephen Kent, IAB Member, IRSG Member 🔐

Stephen Kent is the Chief Scientist of BBN Communications, a division of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., where he has been engaged in network security research and development for over a decade 🔒 His work includes designing user authentication and access control systems, end-to-end encryption and access control systems for packet networks, performance analysis of security mechanisms, and secure transport layer and electronic message protocols 💅

Dr. Kent chairs the Internet Privacy and Security Research Group and is a member of the Internet Activities Board 👑 He served on the Secure Systems Study Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, and he is a member of the National Research Council assessment panel for the NIST National Computer Systems Laboratory. He was a charter member of the board of directors of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. Dr. Kent is the author of a book chapter and numerous technical papers on packet network security, and he has served as a referee, panelist and session chair for a number of security-related conferences 🎤 He has lectured on network security on behalf of government agencies, universities and private companies throughout the United States, Western Europe and Australia 🌏

Dr. Kent received his B.S. in mathematics from Loyola University of New Orleans, and his S.M., E.E., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 🎓 He's a member of the ACM and Sigma Xi, and he appears in Who's Who in the Northeast and Who's Who of Emerging Leaders ✨

4.16 Anthony G. Lauck, IAB Member 🧠

Since 1976, Anthony G. Lauck has been responsible for network architecture and advanced development at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he currently manages the Telecommunications and Networks Architecture and Advanced Development group 💻 For the past fifteen years, his group has designed the network architecture and protocols behind Digital's DECnet computer networking products. They've played a leading role in local area network standardization, including Ethernet, FDDI, and transparent bridged LANs, and they've also played a leading role in standardizing the OSI network and transport layers 🔥 Most recently, they completed the architecture for the next phase of DECnet, which is based on OSI while providing backward compatibility with DECnet Phase IV 🎀 Before his role in network architecture, he was responsible for setting the direction of Digital's PDP-11 communications products. Besides Digital, he worked at Autex, Inc., where he was a designer of a transaction processing system for securities trading, and at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, where he developed an early remote batch system 🌟

Mr. Lauck received his BA degree from Harvard in 1965 🎓 He has worked in a number of data communication areas, from designing physical links for local area networks to applications for distributed processing. His current interests include high speed local and wide area networks, multiprotocol networking, network security, and distributed processing 💜 He was a member of the Committee on Computer-Computer Communications Protocols of the National Research Council, which did a comparison of the TCP and TP4 transport protocols for DOD and NBS. He was also a member of the National Science Foundation Network Technical Advisory Board. In December of 1984, Science Digest magazine recognized him as one of America's 100 brightest young scientists for his work on computer networking 🏆

In 1978 Vint Cerf came to Digital to give a lecture on TCP and IP, just before the big blizzard ❄️ I was so happy to see that TCP/IP shared the same connectionless philosophy of networking as DECnet 🥰 Some years later, Digital decided that future phases of DECnet would be based on standards. Since Digital was a multinational company, those standards would need to be international. Unfortunately, in 1980 ISO rejected TCP and IP on national political grounds 😤 When it looked like the emerging OSI standards were going to be limited to purely connection-oriented networking, I got really worried and started efforts to standardize connectionless networking in OSI. As it turned out, TCP/IP kept its initial lead over OSI, moving internationally as the Internet expanded, so it became an international protocol suite and met my original needs 🌍 I hope the Internet can evolve into a multiprotocol structure that can accommodate changing networking technologies, and can do so with a minimum of religious fervor 🙏 It'll be exciting to solve problems like network scale and security, especially on a network that has to serve users while it evolves 🚀

4.17 Dr. Barry Leiner, IAB Member 🛰️

Dr. Leiner joined Advanced Decision Systems in September 1990, where he is responsible for corporate research directions 📊 Advanced Decision Systems focuses on the creation of information processing technology, systems, and products that enhance decision making power. Before joining ADS, Dr. Leiner was Assistant Director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at NASA Ames Research Center 🚀 In that position, he formulated and carried out research programs ranging from the development of advanced computer and communications technologies through to their application to scientific research. Before coming to RIACS, he was Assistant Director for C3 Technology in the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). In that role, he was responsible for a broad range of research programs aimed at developing the technology base for large-scale survivable distributed command, control and communication systems 🛡️ Before that, he was a Senior Engineering Specialist with Probe Systems, an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech, and a Research Engineer with GTE Sylvania 🧚

Dr. Leiner received his BEEE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1967, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1969 and 1973, respectively 🎓 He has done research in a variety of areas, including direction finding systems, spread spectrum communications and detection, data compression theory, image compression, and most recently computer networking and its applications 📡 He has published in these areas in both journals and conferences, and he received the best paper of the year award in the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Transactions in 1979, and in the IEEE Communications Magazine in 1984 🏅 Dr. Leiner is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of ACM, Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu 💜

My first exposure to the internet (actually Arpanet) was in 1977, when, as a DARPA contractor, I was given access 🌐 At that point, the Arpanet was primarily used to support DARPA and related activities, and it was confined to a relatively small set of users and sites. The Internet technology was just in the process of being developed and demonstrated. My DARPA contract was actually related to the Packet Radio Network, and the main motivation for the Internet technology was to connect the mobile Packet Radio Network to the long-haul Arpanet 📻 Now, only 13 years later, things have changed radically! The Internet has grown by several orders of magnitude in size and connects a much wider community, including academic, commercial, and government users 📈 It has spread well beyond the USA to include many organizations throughout the world 🌍 It has grown beyond the experimental network to provide operational service, and its influence can be seen throughout the computer communications community ✨

4.18 Daniel C. Lynch, IAB Member 💻

Daniel C. Lynch has been president and founder of Interop, Inc. (formerly named Advanced Computing Environments) in Mountain View, California, since 1985 💼 A member of ACM, IEEE and the IAB, he is active in computer networking, with a primary focus on promoting the understanding of network operational behavior. The annual INTEROP conference and exhibition is the major vehicle for his efforts 🎪

As the director of the Information Processing Division for the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey (USC-ISI), Lynch led the Arpanet team that made the transition from the original NCP protocols to the current TCP/IP based protocols 🔄 He directed this effort with 75 people from 1980 until 1983 👑

He was Director of Computing Facilities at SRI International in the late 70's, keeping the computing needs of over 3,000 employees running 💅. Before that he managed the computing lab for SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, which researched robotics, vision, speech understanding, theorem proving and distributed databases 🤖. While he was at SRI, he did the initial debugging of the TCP/IP protocols with BBN 🔥. Literally iconic.

Lynch has been in computer networking since 1973 🌸. Before that he wrote realtime software for missile decoy detection for the USAF 🚀. He did his undergrad training in mathematics and philosophy at Loyola University of Los Angeles, then got a Master's in mathematics from UCLA in 1965 🎓.

Lynch's own words, and they're giving wisdom ✨: the Internet grew because it solves simple problems in as simple a manner as possible. Building a huge Internet has never been easy 🧩. We still don't know how to do routing in a huge internet. Then you add real-world commercial security and the wish for "classes of service," and suddenly the challenges are huge 😭. He thinks we'll have to get a lot more involved with operational provisioning, like the stuff the phone companies and credit card firms have wrestled with for ages. The hope is that we can do all that and still keep the friendly attitude Internetters have always had 🫶.

4.19 David M. Piscitello, IETF OSI Area Co-director

Okay, Dave's origin story is so relatable 💀. He got a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Villanova University in 1974, with a strong minor in Philosophy 📚. Real analysis and metric spaces made him want to go to grad school for Philosophy instead 🧠. But grad school needs serious dollars, so he took a programming job at Burroughs and assembly/micro-coded his way through two semesters of graduate work at Villanova 💻. Then he realized teaching existentialism wasn't going to pay a real mortgage. (This was the Carter era, and interest rates were nearly 15%!! 😱) So he stayed at Burroughs and built compilers 🛠️.

Then he discovered data communications, which was remote job entry and turnkey stuff. Not quite existentialism, but close 🦋. Somehow, after agreeing to work on a proprietary HDLC (IBM had SDLC, so Burroughs felt it had to have BDLC, obviously 😂), he got pulled into transport and networking protocols for something called Open Systems Interconnection 🌈. He was boning up on the literature, and there was this relatively obscure protocol suite called TCP/IP, plus something from Xerox, and even something from Burroughs that looked a lot like that TCP/IP thing. He got super excited about building something international and new 🔥. He eventually moved within Burroughs to an architecture group and got immersed in network layer protocols for OSI and Burroughs Network Architecture 💅.

He started going to ANSI and ISO meetings on OSI NL protocols. One day, Dave Oran (DEC), Lyman Chapin (then at Data General), Ross Callon (then at BBN) and Dave met in a conference room at a DEC location and dreamed up ISO 8473 (ISO IP, ISO CLNP) ✨. Somehow it became his problem, along with basically everything in the OSI stack that was datagram or "connectionless." So for years he slugged it out with the X.25 community to make sure datagrams and internetworking would get international acceptance 💪. He wasn't alone, either. Dave O., Lyman, and Ross (and later Christine Hemrick, then at NTIA) became an OSI version of the Gang of Four 👑.

His first taste of the IETF was in Boston in the mid-eighties, when an IETF and an ANSI meeting were both held at BBN, and they swapped routing insights 🗺️. He was a proponent of distance vector routing, specifically a protocol called BIAS (Burroughs Interactive Adaptive routing System. Go figure how anyone leaves the "R" out of a routing protocol acronym 🙈). Later, with Jeff Rosenberg and Steve Gruchevsky of Burroughs (by then they were Unisys), he introduced BIAS as a candidate for OSI IS-IS routing in what he calls the "late, great, OSI Routing debate" 🏆. Radia Perlman and Dave Oran introduced what became OSI IS-IS, a link-state/SPF routing system. He says the routing debate was the highlight of his standards participation, even on the losing side, because every meeting was full of good discussions and challenging technical issues 🥹.

Eight years in OSI, nearly all of it uphill, took its toll 😮‍💨. He got tired of the political purgatory that came with every incremental change in OSI, so he left, frustrated. He also left Unisys around the same time, also frustrated, to take on what seemed like another Quijotian task: helping Christine Hemrick at Bellcore bring high speed datagram services into public networks, in the form of SMDS 🚀.

Since 1988 he's been with SMDS at Bellcore, working on several parts of its design. The most rewarding part was designing an SNMP agent for SMDS 🎀.

He's been a sort of chaotic neutral in the OSI vs. TCP/IP debate, and he still is 🌀. He thinks both technologies have a lot to offer. TCP/IP has the better standards development infrastructure, though. He took the OSI integration area director job with Erik Huizer because he believed he could do more for OSI deployment inside the Internet infrastructure than anywhere else 💜. It's been rewarding and frustrating. The rewards come from working with truly bright, energetic people who actually care about implementing and deploying OSI applications and transport stacks 🫶. The frustration comes from dealing with the IP-supremist and near racist attitude that often pops up against OSI in the Internet 😤.

Oh well, yet another Quijotian task 💅. You've probably figured out by now that he doesn't run from a good fight ⚔️.

4.20 Dr. Jonathan B. Postel, IAB Member, RFC Editor, IRSG Chair

Jon Postel joined ISI in March 1976 as a member of the technical staff, and he's now Division Director of the Communications Division 👑. These days he's still shaping the Internet through a bunch of ISI projects: Gigabit Networking, Multimedia Conferencing, Protocol Engineering, Los Nettos, Parallel Computing System Research, and the Fast Parts Automated Broker 🧚. Earlier at ISI, he created the "Los Nettos" regional network for the Los Angeles area and built prototype implementations of several Internet protocols, including the Simple Mail Transport Protocol, the Domain Name Service, and an experimental Multimedia Mail system 📬. He also studied the possible approaches for converting the ARPANET from the NCP protocol to the TCP protocol, and he helped design many protocols for the Internet community 🌸.

Before ISI, Jon was at SRI International in Doug Engelbart's group, developing the NLS (later called Augment) system 🖥️. While at SRI, he led a special project to write protocol specifications for the Defense Communication Agency for AUTODIN-II. Most of the development effort at ARC during that period went into the National Software Works 🛠️. Before SRI, he spent a few months with Keydata redesigning and reimplementing NCP on the DEC PDP-15 data management system ARPA used. Before Keydata, he worked at the Mitre Corporation in Virginia, where he studied ARPANET Network Control Protocol implementations 🔍.

Jon got his B.S. and M.S. in Engineering in 1966 and 1968 (respectively) from UCLA, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA too 🎓. He's a member of the ACM. He still takes part in the Internet Activities Board and edits the "Request for Comments" Internet document series 📝. The RFC Editor, honestly iconic 👑.

Jon's own words: his first ARPANET experience was at UCLA, in the group that became the Network Measurement Center 🦋. When they heard the first IMP would be installed at UCLA, they had to get busy. They worked with the other early sites to develop protocols, and they had to get their own computing environment in order. That included building a time-sharing operating system for the SDS Sigma-7 computer 💻. The ARPANET, and then the Internet, kept growing, and always faster than anyone expected 🚀. He thinks three things made the Internet a success: 1) public documentation of the protocols, 2) free (or cheap) software for the popular machines, and 3) vendor independence 🫶.

4.21 Joyce K. Reynolds, IETF User Services Area Director

Joyce K. Reynolds has been with USC/Information Sciences Institute since 1979 🌈. She helped develop the DARPA Experimental Multimedia Mail System, the Post Office Protocol, the Telnet Protocol, and the Telnet Option Specifications 💜. She also helped update the File Transfer Protocol 📂. Her current technical interests include internet protocols, internet management, technical researching, writing and editing, Internet security policies, X.500 directory services, and Telnet Options 🧠. She set up a brand new informational series of notes for the Internet community: FYI (For Your Information) RFCs 🎀. FYI RFCs are documents useful to network users, and their purpose is to share general, useful information with broad applicability ✨.

Joyce K. Reynolds got her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in the Social Sciences from the University of Southern California (USC) 💅 She's the Associate Editor of the Internet Society News 📰 and a member of the California Internet Federation and the American Society of Professional and Executive Women. She's also affiliated with Phi Alpha Theta (Honors Society) 🎓 and is currently listed in Who's Who in the American Society of Professional and Executive Women and USC's Who's Who in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences Alumni Directory. Iconic, honestly 👑

Okay, so Joyce's personal note is everything 🥹 She's been in the Internet world for thirteen years, and she was there for the switch from TENEX to TOPS-20 machines in 1979 and then survived the NCP to TCP transition in 1980 😭 She also celebrated the ISI 1000 Hour Club, because one of their TOPS-20 machines set a record for staying up and running for 1000 consecutive hours without crashing 🔥 Then she watched the ARPANET split into the Milnet and Internet sides, and she lived through the whole thing 🫶 Her most memorable times are the people who helped research and build the Internet. It was a lot of hard, intense work, but also creative, exciting fun 🌈 And for the future? She's looking forward, and so am I, bestie ✨

4.22 Dr. Michael Schwartz, IRSG Member

Michael Schwartz has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, since 1987 🎓 His research is about distributed systems and networks of international scale, especially how to help users discover resources they care about, like documents, software, data, network services, and people 🔍 He also does network measurement studies on how the global Internet is used and connected 🌐

Dr. Schwartz chairs the recently formed Internet Research Task Force research group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service 💜 He's also a member of ACM, CPSR, and IEEE. He got his B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from UCLA, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington 👑 As a grad student, he worked on locally distributed systems, heterogeneous systems, and naming problems. He also did radar systems work at Hughes Aircraft Company and multi-vendor telephone switching problems at Bell Communications Research 🛠️

Michael's vision is so good 😭 The Internet has grown a ton in connectivity and functionality over the past five years, but it's still not even close to mature, and most people would agree. He thinks what's missing most is ease of use for non-experts, plus facilities that keep the Internet useful as it gets way bigger 🌸 Remember when the Macintosh came out and "ordinary users" could just buy a computer, turn it on, and start working? He wants that same energy for networking and distributed systems, so people can do sophisticated stuff on big networks without needing so much specialized knowledge 💖 He's especially into services and protocols that let people search for resources they're interested in, collaborate with people who share their interests and concerns using really flexible criteria for shared interest, and roam the global Internet by plugging their mobile computers in anywhere and getting set up to work at each new site, seamlessly and effortlessly 🦋

4.23 Bernhard Stockman, IETF Operations Area Co-director

Bernhard Stockman graduated with a Master of Science in Electric Engineering and Computer Systems from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1986 🇸🇪 After a couple of years as a researcher in distributed computer systems, he was employed in 1989 by the NORDUNET and SUNET Network Operation Centre, where he's responsible for network monitoring and traffic measurement 📊

Bernhard is mainly into international cooperative efforts 🌍 He chairs the RIPE Task Force on Network Monitoring and Statistics. He chairs the European Engineering and Planning Group (EEPG), which makes him co-chair of the Intercontinental Engineering and Planning Group (IEPG) too 🙌 He chairs the IETF Operations Area, which makes him the first non-US member of the IESG, and he's also co-chairing the Operations Requirements Area Directorate (ORAD) ✨

He's currently working on the specification and implementation of a pan-European multiprotocol backbone 💅 He's also chairing the group in charge of the technical design of the European Backbone (EBONE) infrastructure 🔥

4.24 Gregory Vaudreuil, IESG Member

Greg Vaudreuil is currently both the Internet Engineering Steering Group Secretary and the IETF Manager 📋 As IESG Secretary, he's responsible for shepherding Internet standards track protocols through the standards process. As IETF Manager, he shares responsibility with the IESG Area Directors for chartering and managing the progress of all working groups in the IETF 🫡 He also chairs the Internet Mail Extensions working group 💌

He graduated from Duke University with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a major in Public Policy Studies 🎀 He got thrust into the heart of the IETF when he took a position with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives to manage the explosive growth of the IETF 🚀 Main character energy, no cap ⭐

5. Security Considerations

Security issues are not discussed in this memo 🔒 Nothing to see here for this one, bestie 🙈

6. Author's Address

Gary Scott Malkin
Xylogics, Inc.
53 Third Avenue
Burlington, MA  01803

Phone:  (617) 272-8140
EMail:  gmalkin@Xylogics.COM

📦 where this page comes from

ietf: rfc1336 1992-05
💖 girlified by claude-haiku-5-5 on 2026-10-15: a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms