I was reminded of Jon by this article in Wired, mentioned in some random Reddit post (and yes, the slug in the URL has a typo in it…).
I worked (indirectly) for Jon at ISI for a few years. He was my division director and I was a random new researcher, so I didn’t interact too much with him. But when I did he was always supportive and just plain nice.
He dealt with an insane amount of email – he edited just about every RFC along with IANA and who knows what else.
I was amazed by how much he got done and vividly remember his “email filing system”: every month he would move 100% of his email to an archive folder by month and start out with an empty inbox. This was long before anyone had heard of “inbox zero”.
I don’t think he’s well known outside of geeky networking circles, but people would be amazed if they knew how much he was involved with the creation of the Internet. His name and influence are seen in most of the foundational docs of the Internet, including things like IP and TCP.
A little searching turned up these two nice rememberances of Jon, by Paul Vixie and Vint Cerf
I just learned from Vint’s note that they both worked for Len Kleinrock. Yet another reminder that the Internet used to be a small place – I wound up working for Len at Nomadix a few years later (long story there…) Len’s another giant of the Internet…