Time & Perspective Quote by Jon Postel

The quiet tragedy in Postel's line is how gently it indicts the tech world’s favorite superstition: that today’s cleverness can outrun tomorrow’s scale. He’s not confessing a blunder so much as describing a structural hazard of infrastructure thinking. The original IPv4 choice - 32 bits - wasn’t stupidity; it was a bet placed under real constraints, when “network” still felt like a specialized tool, not the atmosphere everyone would eventually breathe.

Postel’s intent is pragmatic, almost parental: remember that standards are decisions that harden. Once baked into protocols, “temporary” numbers become constitutional law. The subtext is sharper. He’s pointing at the gap between engineering imagination and social reality. Engineers can model throughput and packet loss; they’re worse at predicting how quickly institutions, markets, and everyday life will pour into a system once it proves useful. The surprise isn’t just “more computers,” it’s the internet becoming a default layer for commerce, identity, politics - everything that generates endpoints.

Context matters because Postel was one of the central stewards of the internet’s early rules, a person whose authority came from trust and competence rather than corporate mandate. That gives the quote its muted power: it’s a founding figure acknowledging that foundational choices carry costs, and that those costs show up decades later as scarcity, workarounds, and geopolitical fights over address space. The final slip - “to small” - reads like a human glitch in an otherwise clinical observation, fitting for a problem defined by tiny units that became too consequential to ignore.