I don't give this reminiscence ANY credit. The very first version of Postel's law makes it VERY clear that Postel intended his law to deal with non-compliant behavior in a tolerant or "liberal" way: "In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior. That is, it should be careful to send well-formed datagrams, but should accept any datagram that it can interpret (e.g., not object to technical errors where the meaning is still clear)."
See my potted history of Postel's law: http://ironick.typepad.com/ironick/2005/05/my_history_of_t.h...