John C. Klensin is a political scientist and computer science professional who is active in Internet-related issues.

Career

His career includes 30 years as a principal research scientist at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, including a period as INFOODS Project Coordinator for the

United Nations University The (UNU) is the think tank and academic arm of the United Nations. Headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, with diplomatic status as a UN institution, its mission is to help resolve global issues related to human development and welfare thr ...

, distinguished engineering fellow at

MCI WorldCom MCI, Inc. (subsequently Worldcom and MCI WorldCom) was a telecommunications company. For a time, it was the second largest long-distance telephone company in the United States, after AT&T. Worldcom grew largely by acquiring other telecommunic ...

, and Internet architecture vice president at

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...

; he is now an independent consultant.

The Cambridge Project

Klensin was involved in The Cambridge Project, a social science data management cooperation project taking place at MIT, Harvard and other universities from 1969 to 1977. As a part of this program, John Klensin led the development of the Consistent System targeted for use by Social Scientists. The Consistent System ran on top of the

Multics Multics ("Multiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of ...

operating system.

Internet

His involvement with Internet protocols began in 1969, when he worked on the

File Transfer Protocol The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and da ...

. In 1992,

Randy Bush Randy is a given name, popular in the United States and Canada. It is primarily a masculine name. It was originally derived from the names Randall, Randolf, Randolph, as well as Bertrand and Andrew, and may be a short form (hypocorism) of them ...

and John Klensin created the ''Network Startup Resource Center'', helping dozens of countries to establish connections with FidoNet,

UseNet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

, and when possible

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

IETF

Klensin is the author or co-editor of over 40 RFCs, and has served as

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements an ...

Applications Area director 1993-1995,

Internet Architecture Board The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is "a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and an advisory body of the Internet Society (ISOC). Its responsibilities include architectural oversight of IETF activities, Internet Standards ...

member 1996-2002, and its chair 2000-2002. He again served on the Board from 2009-2011. The RFCs written or edited by Klensin include

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients ty ...

(including RFC 4409 and RFC 5321),

IDNA An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-latin script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese ( Mandarin, simplifie ...

(including RFC 5890 and RFC 6055),

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

(including RFC 5137 and RFC 5198), and other fields including

CRAM-MD5 In cryptography, CRAM-MD5 is a challenge–response authentication mechanism (CRAM) based on the HMAC-MD5 algorithm. As one of the mechanisms supported by the Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL), it is often used in email software as pa ...

(RFC 2195) and IETF policies (RFC 3933). In March 2011

8BITMIME The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typi ...

(RFC 6152) was published as

Internet standard In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They allow ...

STD 71, in November 2011 Mail submission (RFC 6409) was published as STD 72. His

i18n In computing, internationalization and localization (American English, American) or internationalisation and localisation (British English), often abbreviated i18n and L10n, are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional ...

work also included an

April Fools' Day RFC April is the fourth month of the year in the Gregorian and Julian calendars. It is the first of four months to have a length of 30 days, and the second of five months to have a length of less than 31 days. April is commonly associated with ...

in collaboration with Harald Alvestrand (RFC 5242) and

MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message ...

in collaboration with Ned Freed (RFC 4289 among others). , he is a member of the ''RFC Independent Submissions Editorial Board''. He is working on several Internet drafts.

Awards and honours

*2003 - INCITS Merit Award. *2007 - inducted as a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

. *2012 - inducted into the

Internet Hall of Fame The Internet Hall of Fame is an honorary lifetime achievement award administered by the Internet Society (ISOC) in recognition of individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the Internet.

by the

Internet Society The Internet Society (ISOC) is an American nonprofit advocacy organization founded in 1992 with local chapters around the world. Its mission is "to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people ...

References