Science & Tech Quote by Jon Postel

Picture the moment: a chemistry classroom, the supposed temple of beakers and stoichiometry, and in the row ahead a student hunched over something that reads as arts-and-crafts. Postel’s anecdote lands because it captures a genuine historical hinge point, when programming didn’t yet look like “software” so much as manual pattern-making - an activity closer to puzzle assembly than to any established scientific practice.

The line’s quiet punch is in the misrecognition. Postel isn’t mocking the chemistry class; he’s showing how new computing was, how illegible it appeared even in a technical setting. The “jigsaw puzzle” image isn’t just cute, it’s precise: early programming often involved literal cards, symbolic fragments, and meticulous ordering. To an uninitiated observer, the work is all structure with no visible product - like watching someone build meaning out of scraps.

Subtextually, Postel is sketching the origins of a mindset that would later define internet engineering: the world’s biggest systems emerging from small, careful acts of assembly performed by people who looked, at the time, like they were doing something slightly ridiculous. It’s also a reminder that disciplines don’t announce themselves with fanfare. They arrive as weird little practices happening in the margins of other fields until they suddenly become the field everyone else has to learn.