Hi Brian and Andrew,
My memory aligns pretty well with what Mike wrote, and I would add a bit of flavor. Lest there be any doubt about who had the last word as to what went into an RFC back then, it was Jon and no one else. Jon made this point very clearly at the 1991 Atlanta meeting, in which a shouting match took place during the plenary between him and Frank Kastenholz, chair of the Ethernet-MIB working group after Jon changed some variables before releasing the final copy. Jon’s position at the time, after shouting expletives from the back of the room was, “I am not going to publish a faulty specification as an RFC.” It was notably the “I” word that stood out then as it does now.(*). You can find the more politely minuted version of this debate on Page 29 of the Proceedings. The IAB backed Jon up, probably because he was right about the technical error, even if the process wasn’t well defined. And so that did lead to a discussion about the IAB’s role in the process, well prior to the Kobe Cabal and Boston Massacre; but in my memory, neither Jon nor Bob wavered from their positions that they were final arbiters over the series, though neither actively sought confrontation with the IETF or the IAB, but instead sought to facilitate the organization’s goals. The limits of the RFC Editor’s authority has never really tested. This trip through memory lane explains the past, but doesn’t dictate the future. Eliot (*) This, by the way, was my introduction to Jon Postel. |
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