Science Quote by Jon Postel

There is something wonderfully understated about Postel dropping “multimedia teleconferencing” into a plainspoken sentence, as if he’s noting the office coffee order. That flatness is the tell. Postel lived inside the machinery of the early Internet, where the hardest work wasn’t dreaming up a shiny future; it was getting mismatched systems to agree on the basics. So the phrase lands less like sci-fi prophecy and more like an engineer’s quiet signal: we’re building toward richer human presence online, and we’re doing it with the same pragmatic discipline used for packets, protocols, and standards.

The intent is managerial and technical at once. “Another aspect” frames it as one module among many, not a moonshot. “Our work” insists this isn’t a consumer toy; it’s infrastructural labor. And “multimedia teleconferencing” compresses an entire cultural pivot into a single compound noun: voice and video as native citizens of the network, not add-ons.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the myth that the Internet was always destined for streaming and Zoom-style life. In Postel’s era, bandwidth was scarce, hardware uneven, interoperability fragile. Saying this out loud functions as agenda-setting inside a standards culture: naming the application pressures the network to evolve without breaking the principle that made it scale in the first place.

Context matters: coming from a scientist central to Internet coordination, the line reads as institutional foresight. Teleconferencing isn’t pitched as utopian connection; it’s a test case for whether an open, decentralized network can carry intimacy, coordination, and real-time collaboration without collapsing into proprietary silos.