Science & Tech Quote by Jon Postel

It reads like a throwaway origin story, but it’s actually a quiet thesis statement for how the internet got built: by people who treated world-changing infrastructure as an interesting side quest in a lab. Postel isn’t selling destiny or genius. He’s describing a part-time job. That understatement matters, because it signals the culture he came from - pragmatic, tool-driven, and suspicious of grand narratives.

The setup is wonderfully recursive: “one computer to measure the performance of another computer.” In the early 1970s, that wasn’t a cute metaphor, it was the work. Computing was becoming a system of systems, and the only way to understand complex machines was to turn other machines into instruments. The line captures a moment when software stopped being an accessory and became the measuring stick, the microscope, the governance layer. Postel’s later role in shaping core Internet protocols (and acting, informally, as a kind of steward of standards) grows naturally out of this mindset: build something that can observe, compare, and coordinate.

The subtext is also institutional. Graduate school at UCLA places him near the ARPANET’s formative scene, where academic research and defense funding braided together, and “programmer” was still an identity closer to mechanic than celebrity. He frames the work as employment, not ideology - a reminder that the internet’s bones were assembled by people optimizing performance, writing specs, and solving the unglamorous problem right in front of them. That’s the intent: to demythologize, almost accidentally, the mythic.