Jon Postel

Editor and number keeper. Postel edited the RFC series for nearly thirty years and personally kept the registry of addresses, port numbers and protocol codes that later became the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, so that every network used the same numbers. He wrote or edited the specifications for IP, TCP, SMTP email and more, and his robustness principle, be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept, guided implementers for decades. He died in 1998.