Jon Postel
lorenetworkingops culture
The RFC Editor from 1969 until his death in 1998, author or editor of the RFCs that define IP, ICMP and TCP, and the first director of IANA - a job he volunteered for and at first did by hand.
For almost three decades one person shepherded the documents that define the internet, and the numbering authority that keeps addresses and protocol parameters unique began as him keeping a list. That is the part worth sitting with: the global registry now argued over by governments started as a volunteer's clerical habit. His most quoted line, from the 1980 IP specification, is the robustness principle - be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept - which shaped protocol design for forty years and has since been argued against from inside the IAB, on the grounds that tolerated errors become entrenched and eventually become the specification.
Also known as: postel