John C. Klensin is a political scientist and computer science professional who is active in Internet-related issues.[2][3]
Career
His career includes 30 years as a principal research scientist at
MIT, including a period as INFOODS Project Coordinator for the
United Nations University, distinguished engineering fellow at
MCI WorldCom, and Internet architecture vice president at
AT&T; he is now an independent consultant.[2][3]
The Cambridge Project
Klensin was involved in The Cambridge Project,[4] 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[5][6][7] targeted for use by Social Scientists. The Consistent System ran on top of the
Multics operating system.
Internet
His involvement with Internet protocols began in 1969, when he worked on the
File Transfer Protocol.[8]
In 1992,
Randy Bush and John Klensin created the Network Startup Resource Center,[9] helping dozens of countries to establish connections with
FidoNet,
UseNet, and when possible
Internet.
IETF
Klensin is the author or co-editor of over 40
RFCs,[10] and has served as
IETF Applications Area director 1993-1995,[11]Internet Architecture Board member 1996-2002, and its chair 2000-2002.[12] He again served on the Board from 2009 to 2011.[13]
The RFCs written or edited by Klensin include
SMTP (including RFC 4409 and RFC 5321),
IDNA (including RFC 5890 and RFC 6055),
Unicode (including RFC 5137 and RFC 5198), and other fields including
CRAM-MD5 (RFC 2195) and IETF policies (RFC 3933). In March 2011
8BITMIME (RFC 6152) was published as
Internet standard STD 71. In November 2011
Mail submission (RFC 6409) was published as
STD 72.
His
i18n work also included an
April Fools' Day RFC in collaboration with
Harald Alvestrand (RFC 5242) and
MIME in collaboration with
Ned Freed (RFC 4289 among others). As of 2011[update], he is a member of the RFC Independent Submissions Editorial Board.[14] He is working on several Internet drafts.[15]
^Yntema, Douwe B.; Dempster, Arthur P.; Gilbert, John P.; Klensin, John C.; McMains, Wren M.; Porter, William; Stamen, Jeffrey P.; Wiesen, Raymond A. (August 1, 1972).
"The Cambridge project's consistent system". Proceedings of the ACM annual conference on - ACM '72. Vol. 2. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 976–977.
doi:
10.1145/800194.805886.
ISBN9781450374927.
S2CID19079441 – via ACM Digital Library.