[ih] Postel's work history

Sat Nov 7 11:45:49 PST 2026

:) I had my own encounters with government bureaucracy.  One day I went to
the file and pulled a few years' worth of QTRs.  Each one had a cover sheet
-- not the DD-54, but a cover sheet resembling a title page.  The cover
sheet contained all sorts of information.  Contract number, contractor
name, contract dates, total contract amount, title of the work, etc.
However, none of this information indicated the report date or
sequence number or anything that changed from one report to the next.  Nor
did the content of each report help very much ;)

Upon investigation, I discovered the contract contained explicit language
dictating the cover page content of each QTR, and the QTRs were in complete
conformance.

I called the ARPA Program Management Office, our interface to the
contracting offices, and suggested they fix this.  Nothing happened.  Some
time later, I called them again.  Nothing happened.  Yet later, completely
exasperated, I wrote a memo explaining the issue once again and mentioned
that I had already reported it twice before.  This triggered a desperate
search for my previous two complaints.  Since my previous two complaints
were verbal, there was no record.

And in an entirely different setting, I once had a professor call me asking
for relief from a contract constraint.  He had written a lengthy report on
their AI research and discovered an explicit formula in the contract
limiting the total number of pages to 25,000 (i.e., number of pages x
number of copies ≤ 25,000).  He wanted to print more copies.  I thought it
was a good idea since reporting on AI research was skimpy in those days and
I thought it would help the cause.  His contract was part of my budget, but
I was only the COTR.  Relief from a contract requirement could come only
from the Contracting Officer.  I called the Contracting Officer.  He was a
really old guy, maybe 50 years old.  I was in my twenties.  I explained the
issue.  He said no.  I explained it again and said it would be helpful.  He
said no.  I got a little agitated and inappropriately suggested we could
move the next contract renewal to another Contracting Office.  He said we
could do whatever we wanted, but that constraint was a statute.  A
statute!  Not an OMB circular, not a FAR regulation, not an Agency
directive?  There's a whole parfait of regulations and rules.  Statutes are
at the base.  That means Congress passed a law.

He waited a couple of beats, either out of patience with my youth or
enjoying the moment.  "Reports bigger than that have to be sent to the
Government Printing Office."  The light dawns.  I can fill in the rest.
And farmed out to various bidders.  I thanked him for his time, ended the
call, and reorganized.  I wasn't about to give up.  I could have asked
someone else in the office or figured it out myself.  Instead, I decided to
ask someone else who might have faced this problem.  I estimated the
university was roughly at the B+ level of sophistication in dealing with
government bureaucracy.  I called a friend at the Rand Corporation.  Rand
had fifty years of experience dealing with the U.S. government.  Almost
certainly at the A+ level.

My friend listened briefly and responded, "You mean it's a report with
appendices and is in multiple volumes and perhaps has been through a couple
of versions?"  "Why, yes," I said, "that's exactly what he has."

I called the professor back, explained about appendices and volumes, then
sat back in my chair feeling very good about my service to the community
and to the people and government of the United States.

Many years later when I shared this episode with a one of the program
managers who had the same job, he cut me off quickly and said simply cut it
into multiple pieces.  But he was quite a bit older than I had been.
Experience counts.

Steve

On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:10 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Steve - your mention of late quarterly reports reminded me of my first
> encounter with government bureaucracy.
>
> Sometime in the late 1970s, I was PI on some ARPA contract with BBN.
>   Our Finance guy accosted me one day to say that the government was
> refusing to pay a bill because we had not yet submitted our Quarterly
> Technical Report, aka QTR.  I clearly remembered submitting that report,
> on time, after a struggle internally to get everybody involved to write
> their piece.  After some investigation, the ARPA PM (may have been Vint)
> confirmed that ARPA had received the QTR.  But the government still
> refused to pay the bill.
>
> With more investigation, we discovered that all Deliverables had to be
> accompanied by a government form (a "DD-54" IIRC).   The form for our
> QTR had either been forgotten by the BBN bureaucracy or lost in its
> travels through the government bureaucracy.  No DD-54, no Deliverable
> received.  The actual QTR didn't really matter.  Without the DD-54, the
> government withheld payment, but no one seemed able to explain why.
>
> That was my first lesson in how to deal with government bureaucracy -
> just do what the system requires.  I didn't know Jon had worked on the
> Keydata system (if it was actually in use yet at ARPA), or I might have
> called him up and reported a Bug.   I suspect he would have told me it's
> a Feature.
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
> On 11/7/26 06:15, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> > Lyman,
> >
> > Thanks!  I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.
> >
> > The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.  It held copies
> > of the contracts and management reports.  The system was a one-off system
> > developed by Keydata under contract through our office (IPTO).  It was an
> > interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director, Steve Lukasik,
> > had direct access to it.
> >
> > Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking of contract
> > status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at Cameron
> > Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.  Paper reports arrived monthly.  In
> > addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also disrupted the
> flow
> > of control.  One day I got a call from the director asking why
> contractor X
> > hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few years.  Prior to
> the
> > creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been interested in
> past
> > quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.  In the process of
> asking,
> > we would have become aware of the situation and we would likely have
> > reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand for updates.
> >
> > We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a host was a
> > natural step.  And Jon was just the right person to help Keydata add
> > support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.
> >
> > Steve
> >
> >
> > Sent by a Verified
> >
> > sender
> >
> > On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46 AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
> > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> >> A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
> >>
> https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
> >>
> >> - Lyman
> >>
> >>> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08 AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
> >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >>> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
> >>>
> >>> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
> >>> SRI XXXX-XXXX
> >>> <unknown>
> >>> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
> >>>
> >>> thanks
> >>>
> >>> vint
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