Science & Tech Quote by Jon Postel

Postel’s offhand “maybe” is doing a lot of work. Here’s one of the Internet’s quiet architects, not pitching a shiny sci-fi destiny but treating a world-changing idea like a practical feature request: audio and video “in the sense of teleconferencing and telephone calls,” delivered through your “work station.” The modesty is the message. In the late 20th century, when the network was still largely an academic and research instrument, Postel frames the future as an extension of existing utilities - phones, meetings, office routines - not as entertainment, spectacle, or social upheaval. That’s a scientist’s imagination: concrete use-cases, lightly sketched, meant to be built.

The subtext is a blueprint for normalization. Calling it “picture phone” echoes AT&T’s earlier, famously premature videophone dreams, but Postel relocates it from specialized hardware into the general-purpose computer. The “work station” detail matters: he’s imagining the Internet as workplace infrastructure, a layer underneath institutional life. Teleconferencing is not a gimmick; it’s a cost-saving, time-saving substitution for presence, with all the social and managerial implications that follow.

There’s also an implicit faith in the Internet’s end-to-end versatility: if the network can move packets, it can eventually carry voices and faces. Postel’s intent isn’t to predict a gadget; it’s to quietly assert a principle. The future arrives not with fanfare, but when the network becomes boring enough to host the most human of needs: to talk, to see, to convene.