LEADERSHIP IN THEORY
Design Principles in Leadership: Postel’s Law
Be Accepting: Everyone Has Different Variables To give
An early pioneer of the Internet, Jon Postel was an American computer scientist who contributed significantly to its early stages. Many of his contributions were specifically towards Internet standards, a set of protocols that promote consistent and universal use of the Internet worldwide.
Postel’s influence helped shape the Internet we know of today: SMTP allowed us to send emails, TCP/IP determined the way data is moved between networks and DNS to translate domain names into IP addresses to receive data.
Yet, these barely cover the number of contributions he made as “The Editor of the Internet”.
In one of the protocols he edited, Postel penned a quote that showed his idea of how people should build and develop on the internet. In an early specification of the Transmission Control Protocol — a protocol that defined a foundation of virtually all existing traffic on the Internet — he introduced the robustness principle.
“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” — Jon Postel, a philosophy for the TCP, RFC 793
