Press enter or click to view image in full size
Jon Postel logged into his computer from a meeting’s terminal room, edited a file, and gave another engineer the number he needed. The engineer, Paul Vixie, had expected a negotiation with a large organization. Someone had told him to ask the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, then explained that he could probably find the authority walking around the meeting.
Vixie recalled the encounter in a remembrance published in 1998. Five years earlier, at his first Internet Engineering Task Force meeting, he had been extending the system that turns internet names into usable directions. He needed a small piece of shared vocabulary: a number telling other computers what kind of request his new feature made.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, coordinated such identifiers. If independently written software was going to understand the same number the same way, somebody had to keep the assignments straight. Postel worked at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. In Vixie’s account, the impressive institutional name resolved to a person who could sit down and do the work.
“The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority had acted decisively and without either haste or delay,” Vixie wrote.