Science & Tech Quote by Jon Postel

A culture doesn’t announce its revolutions with fireworks; it quietly stops defining the new word. Jon Postel’s observation nails that uncanny moment when a technical novelty becomes background reality: the Internet has crossed from specialist jargon into assumed common knowledge. The “milestone” isn’t faster protocols or broader connectivity. It’s the disappearance of the footnote.

Postel, an engineer who helped steward the Internet’s early plumbing, isn’t dazzled by hype. His surprise is almost managerial, the reaction of someone who has spent years in the weeds watching systems fail for banal reasons. When a magazine can drop “internet” without a parenthetical, it signals that the concept has stabilized enough to be taken for granted by editors, fact-checkers, and readers. That’s social adoption, not merely technical deployment.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, it’s a quiet victory: the network has become ordinary, and ordinary is the highest compliment infrastructure can receive. On the other, it’s a warning about amnesia. When a society stops explaining a technology, it also stops interrogating it. The Internet becomes like electricity or roads: everywhere, powerful, and largely invisible until something breaks or someone abuses it.

Context matters here: Postel lived in the hinge era when the Internet was slipping out of labs and universities into mass media and commerce. His line captures the instant the expert loses sole ownership of the term - and with it, the ability to control the narrative about what the Internet is for, and who gets to shape it.