"One can also read that Jon was the editor of the RFC, and may think
that Jon checked only the grammar or the format of the RFCs. Nothing
could be further from the truth, not that he did not check it, but in
addition, being the corporate memory, Jon had indicated many times to
authors that earlier work had treated the same subject, and that
their work would be improved by learning about that earlier work."
...
" Our foundation and infrastructure of standards was the secret weapon
that won the war. Jon created it, using the RFC mechanism initiated
by Steve Crocker. It was Jon who immediately realized their
importance, and the need for someone to act as the curator, and
volunteered.
The lightning speed with which Microsoft joined the Internet was not
possible without the quality of the existing standards that were so
well documented.
During the transition from ARPA, through the NSF, to the commercial
world there was a point in which the trivial funding required for the
smooth operation of editing and distributing the RFCs was in doubt.
At that time the prospect of not having funds to run this operation
was very real. Finally the problem was solved and the process
suffered no interruption.
What most of the involved agencies and managers did not know is that
there was never a danger of any interruption. Jon would have done it
even with no external funding. If they did not pay him to do it, he
would have paid them to let him do it. For him it was not a job, it
was labor of love."
" When fancy formatting creeped into the Internet community, Jon
resisted the temptation to allow fancy formats for RFCs. Instead, he
insisted on them being in ASCII, easy to e-mail, guaranteed to be
readable anywhere in the world. The instant availability and
usability of RFCs was much more important to him than how fancy they
looked."
I’ve updated the post accordingly and mentioned more names, Jibal. I also referenced our conversation here, thanks again. The revised post should be visible now, though sometimes clearing cookies helps if it doesn’t show up right away
I think there's a fair argument to be made that this was a bad decision on Postel's part, because it made it harder to have good diagrams as well as mathematical formula, and of course it also meant that we couldn't render many people's names correctly. In any case, RFCs are now published in HTML and allow non-ASCII characters.
