Saturday, May 28, 2022

Remembering Ned Freed (1959-2022)


The Internet lost a hero this week. Ned Freed and I were in our early thirties when we met. I was a researcher in Pittsburgh, passionate about extending email to include pictures, sounds, and rich text in any language. Ned was a young entrepreneur in California, passionate about improving interoperation between independently designed email-like systems. We were the closest of collaborators during the early 1990's, when we led the design of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) -- three years of intense partnership that turned out to be the career highlight that both of us would be best remembered for.

MIME is now used trillions of times daily, in virtually every web page and email message, and we've both long since recognized that it would feature prominently in our obituaries. But it isn't what I think of when I remember Ned. MIME was the product of our collaboration, but it was the collaboration itself that I most treasure.

It's my observation that a remarkable number of innovations seem to originate in the well-timed creative dynamic of a pair of fortuitously compatible people in a collaboration that can be far more intimate than, say, merely producing a baby. UNIX came from the pairing of Thompson and Richie, Apple from Jobs and Wozniak, Microsoft from Gates and Allen, Google from Page and Brin. Cerf and Kahn gave us TCP/IP, while Parker and Stone gave us South Park and The Book of Mormon. Fate -- in the form of Einar Stefferud (universally known as Stef), one of the less remembered heroes of the early Internet -- brought Ned and me together at the moment when something like MIME was desperately needed.

I think that such creative partnerships usually involve people with very different but complementary personalities and skills, focused on a common task. Ned and I were nearly the exact opposite -- temperamentally fairly similar, but initially focused on very different tasks. I wanted to make email richer, while he wanted to make it more robust and interoperable. A third constituency lacked email expertise and was laser-focused on freeing email from its English-only heritage. When Stef realized that these three goals were highly complementary and might be achieved together, he introduced me to Ned and suggested we get involved with the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and try to change the world.

We did, but in retrospect that's not nearly as remarkable to me as the fact that we did it without a single argument. Perhaps in part because we came into the MIME work with different motivations and expertise, we had no built-in disagreements. I've had other very successful collaborations, but there was always something to disagree about, sometimes leading to the kind of blowout fights that make you wonder how a couple can manage to stay together. With Ned and me, however, it was all harmony. I know we weren't always right -- I frequently point to one or two aspects of MIME that embarrass me to this day -- but we were even unified in our mistakes.

Or at least, I'm about 99% sure we were that perfectly harmonized. It's hard for me to be absolutely positive, however, because Ned was such a master of reasonableness and amiability. While I would occasionally get overexcited and argumentative, Ned could stay calm and sunny in the face of the most egregious wrong-headedness and ignorance, though he could be frank and even scathing about it in private. There were surely people who worked well with Ned, liked him very much, and never had a clue that he thought they were idiots, so gentle was he in debating and correcting them. He could completely separate their opinions from their identities, and he seemed to like nearly everyone, which meant that nearly everyone liked him. I would not put it past Ned to have disagreed with me so gently that he actually won arguments I never knew we were having.

MIME was our first involvement with Internet standards work, the first RFC either of us had our names on. The MIME work was a career-making breakthrough for both of us, but we went different ways afterwards.  I went off in a number of directions, founding several startups and then helping lead innovation and standards work at IBM and Mimecast. Ned was astonishingly stable and even-keeled, never once changing employers; the company he founded before I met him was acquired by Sun, which was acquired by Oracle, where he remained to the end. His stability, patience, and clarity were a perfect match for standards work, and he never stopped working with the IETF, ending up as the author of over 50 RFC's (far more than my 16, and in fact more than 99.95% of RFC authors), and one of the best known and most respected figures in the Internet standards community.

You only had to meet Ned once to understand why he was so good at this. He was wicked smart, of course, but there are plenty of smart people who flame out in the process of trying to build consensus. But Ned always had a warm smile. His humor could be quite biting in private, but never malicious, and in larger meetings he carried himself in such a way that it was almost impossible not to like him.

I knew Ned for just over half his life, but never without health problems. When I met him, at just barely over 30, he was already deep in his lifelong struggle with ulcerative colitis. He talked openly about his health issues when asked, but I never once heard him complain. In his later years his health led him to stop traveling to IETF meetings, but he remained an active and soothing presence who proved over and over, to a still-skeptical world even within the IETF community, how modern technology can allow people with the right communication skills to be first-class participants from thousands of miles away. He worked so effectively through his illness for so long that I almost stopped worrying about him, as if I expected him to live forever.

The people you hear the most about aren't generally, in my experience, the people who most deserve it. A lot of the most important and constructive work is quiet and behind the scenes. Ned never, to my knowledge, sought to aggrandize himself. Even for the work we did together, I ended up being the one who people know as the "father of the email attachment." But I could never have realized my vision of richer, more powerful email alone. Ned's deep expertise and focus on detail kept me from going down more than a few rabbit holes that could have sunk the whole MIME project, while his disposition probably made the difference between a gradually emerging consensus and a pitched battle of entrenched ideas.

Meeting, collaborating with, and becoming friends with Ned Freed was one of the highlights of my career, and I will miss him for all the time I have left. Although I'm not a believer, I'd like to picture him in heaven right now, smoothing out communication problems between the cherubim and the seraphim, devising protocols for synchronizing the tuning of everyone's harps, and perhaps gently trying to convince God to loosen up and decentralize the universe a little more. If anyone can do it, Ned would be the man. Rest in peace, old friend.

22 comments:

  1. Erudite and poetic tribute to a soul who will be missed increasingly in measure.

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  2. Words...words can not replace human feelings. But words, so excellent they are when the correct ones are chosen.

    Thanks for your choice of words my friend.

    Ned is and will be missed.

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  3. Thank you for those word which help a little.

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  4. Many thanks for this. I'm still reeling too much to be coherent, much less nearly as eloquent as you have been.

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  5. Sorry.. still incoherent... didn't mean the above to be anonymous.

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  6. You painted a good picture of the Ned we all loved. He is missed.

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  7. I first met Ned in the mid-80s at a DECUS. We were about the same age and had similar interests. We got the chance to work together quite closely when I was at TGV and he at Innosoft creating an interface to DEC’s Message Router that we shared between PMDF and MultiNet. Ned was brilliant, funny, a good friend, and a loving husband and father. I fondly recall late nights in their office working until 3am with a pyramid of coke cans in front of each of us. And while he was well-mannered and a prince among men, he could curse with the best of us. MRSDD, indeed Ned. Message Router Sucks Donkey Dicks.

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    1. I wasn't familiar with the acronym MRSDD, but I can attest to its accuracy!

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  8. I had so many wonderful discussions with Ned. Some were one-sided (science), some were heated two-way (politics), most were in-depth remembrances and critiques of theatre, film, and culture. Tamara used to say we were kindred spirits but of course Ned's brilliant mind and memory far outpaced my efforts to keep up with him. I loved him and I will miss him but I know he is at last at peace.

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  9. Sandra Elliott, not anonymous in above comment.

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  10. A deserved tribute to Ned who will be sorely missed.

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  11. Ah Ned, you will be missed. I enjoyed working with you, challenging you and being challenged by you, arguing (always graciously) with you, eating and drinking at many fine meals with you, collaborating with you, . . . The list goes on and on.

    Sigh

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  12. So eloquent, and thereby so appropriate. Thank you Nat for those words of remembrance. Spot on.
    Ned was first my college friend and mentor, then business partner — always there to keep us centered and humble. Wicked smart but oh so kind, thoughtful, considerate. Miss you.

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    1. A fellow Mudder let me know about Ned.

      I was one step removed from his inner circle of college friends but Ned even back then such an obviously special and gifted person. I liked him immensely. I'm pretty sure he thought I was an idiot but he was nevertheless always kind and friendly and somebody I enjoyed being around, just as others have commented.
      We just had our virtual 40th reunion and he was somebody that I mentioned as being worthy of admiration for what they had contributed in their working lives. Now that I'm slowing down in my own work life, Ned was one of those people that I was looking forward to reconnecting with. Shame on me for waiting too long. Goodbye Ned.

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  13. Ned and I got to know each other as IESG members in 2003. Ned was the Applications Area Director, and I was the Security Area Director. He was brilliant, and yet he was mentoring. He will be missed by the whole community.

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  14. Looking back through old email, I find messages of wise counsel from Ned almost every year since 1998 (when Ned joined the IAB) until two months ago. He will indeed be missed.

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  15. He was someone that would always help. A really great person and leader.

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  16. Very nicely said. I got to know Ned some when Process Software took over the maintenance and development of PMDF when Sun acquired Innosoft. Though we had no formal agreement requiring it, Ned provided us with PMDF bug fixes for several years after the deal was done. When he'd find bugs in the Sun product that also appeared in PMDF, he'd fix them in the PMDF code, too, and provide the fix to us. His help was always appreciated.

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  17. This is a heck of a tribute to an IETF leader who I knew, but not well, for a couple of decades. I wasn't an apps guy - I'm still not - but Ned and I crossed paths several times in various mailing list discussions. I can't verify everything that you said, but every observation you made that I could confirm matches my memories of Ned exactly. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

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  18. Thanks for the kind words about Ned. He was truly a fantastic thinker and always willing to help and offer advice when asked. Not always the advice you wanted … “you could do it that way, although it won’t work very well and will probably break horribly in a few years” is a Ned quote I have written in my notes from the 1990s. But always willing to think through a problem and come up with a solution. He will indeed be missed.

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  19. I knew Ned at Harvey Mudd. Though High School indicated by all means I would fluorish at Harvey Mudd, in reality I struggled mightily and it was pretty much 9 months of misery and torture, occasional interrupted by some mythical LA west coast punk shows. Anyhow Ned convinced me that Harvey Mudd was NOT the place for me and exactly why, and what to do as an alternative. I almost screwed THAT up and my path to eventually fluorishing, and graduating with a BSEE and having a great career, but he was the FIRST person to wake me up and tell me I needed to make a change. I heeded his advice. He was super duper smart. He was elevated and illuminating. I just spoke about him yesterday with a friend of mine and then check on his wiki page and was shocked to see he passed away. Sail onwards, silver surfer! God bless you Ned!

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  20. I went to grade school with Ned, in Perkins, OK. He was my friend who accepted me in what felt like awkward childhood social interactions. He was kind, understanding, accepting and encouraging even then. He was brilliant and many of the kids didn’t understand him. But we made a fast friendship and I was so heartbroken when they moved. We just got each other and could talk and play for hours during recess. I have thought of him from time to time and was shocked to see he passed. What a loss of a bright light to the world. I remember his bowl cut blondeish hair and his black horn rimmed glasses. It doesn’t surprise me in the least of what he created and his importance to the world. I will be forever grateful that his light touched my life for such a brief time.

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