What was the first rfc

One of their main purposes was to encourage discussion within the research community. The RFC leaves questions open and is written in a less formal style. This less formal style is now typical of Internet Draft documents, the precursor step before being approved as an RFC.

Once assigned a number and published, an RFC is never rescinded or modified; if the document requires amendments, the authors publish a revised document. Together, the serialized RFCs compose a continuous historical record of the evolution of Internet standards and practices. If an RFC is part of a proposal that is on the Standard Track, then at the first stage, the standard is proposed and subsequently organizations decide whether to implement this Proposed Standard.

A few weeks later the pile had turned into two stacks of folders. I asked him what they were. Apparently, they contained documents for RFC publication. Jon was trying to keep up with the increasing quantity of submissions for RFC publication. I mentioned to him one day that he should learn to let go of some of his work load and task it on to other people. He listened intently, but didn't comment.

The very next day, Jon wheeled a computer stand into my office which was stacked with those documents from his desk intended for RFC publication. He had a big Cheshire cat grin on his face and stated, "I'm letting go! At the top of the stack was a big red three ring notebook. Upon reading its contents, I learned that the NLS system was designed to help people work with information on a computer.

It included a wide range of tools, from a simple set of commands for writing, reading RFC Editor, et al. Thus began my indoctrination to the RFC publication series. Operating systems and computers have changed over the years, but Jon's perseverance about the consistency of the RFC style and quality of the documents remained true. Unfortunately, Jon did not live to see the 30th Anniversary of this series that he unfailingly nurtured. Yet, the spirit of the RFC publication series continues as we approach the new millennium.

Jon would be proud. It was a modest and entirely forgettable memo, but it has significance because it was part of a broad initiative whose impact is still with us today. Bolt, Beranek and Newman had won the all-important contract to build and operate the Interface Message Processors or "IMPs", the forerunners of the modern routers. Although there had been considerable planning of the topology, leased lines, modems and IMPs, there was little organization or planning regarding network applications.

It was assumed the research sites would figure it out. This turned out to be a brilliant management decision at ARPA. Previously, in the summer of , a handful of graduate students and staff members from the four sites were called together to discuss the forthcoming network. There was only a basic outline.

BBN had not yet won the contract, and there was no technical specification for the network's operation. At the first meeting, we scheduled future meetings at each of the other laboratories, thus setting the stage for today's thrice yearly movable feast.

Over the next couple of years, the group grew substantially and we found ourselves with overflow crowds of fifty to a hundred people at Network Working Group meetings.

One tradition that doesn't seem to have changed at all is the spirit of unrestrained participation in working group meetings. Our initial group met a handful of times in the summer and fall of and winter Our earliest meetings were unhampered by knowledge of what the network would look like or how it would interact with the hosts. Depending on your point of view, this either allowed us or forced us to think about broader and grander topics.

We recognized we would eventually have to get around to dealing with message formats and other specific details of low-level protocols, but our first thoughts focused on what applications the network might support. In our view, the 50 kilobit per second communication lines being used for the ARPANET seemed slow, and we worried that it might be hard to provide high-quality interactive service across the network.

I wish we had not been so accurate! Before then, however, we tried to consider the most general designs and the most exciting applications. One thought that captured our imagination was the idea of downloading a small interpretative program at the beginning of a session. The downloaded program could then control the interactions and make efficient use of the narrow bandwidth between the user's local machine and the back-end system the user was interacting with.

The emergence of Java and ActiveX in the last few years finally brings those early ideas to fruition, and we're not done yet. I think we will continue to see striking advances in combining communication and computing.

Two all-important aspects of the early work deserve mention, although they're completely evident to anyone who participates in the process today. First, the technical direction we chose from the beginning was an open architecture based on multiple layers of protocol.

We were frankly too scared to imagine that we could define an all-inclusive set of protocols that would serve indefinitely.

We envisioned a continual process of evolution and addition, and obviously this is what's happened. RFC Editor, et al. After several months of meetings, we felt obliged to write down our thoughts. We parceled out the work and wrote the initial batch of memos. In addition to participating in the technical design, I took on the administrative function of setting up a simple scheme for numbering and distributing the notes.

Mindful that our group was informal, junior and unchartered, I wanted to emphasize these notes were the beginning of a dialog and not an assertion of control. It's now been thirty years since the first RFCs were issued. At the time, I believed the notes were temporary and the entire series would die off in a year or so once the network was running. Thanks to the spectacular efforts of the entire community and the perseverance and dedication of Jon Postel, Joyce Reynolds and their crew, the humble series of Requests for Comments evolved and thrived.

It became the mainstay for sharing technical designs in the Internet community and the archetype for other communities as well. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams and our worst fears. Considering the movement of planet Earth around the Sun and the Sun around the Milky Way galaxy, that first network IS far away in the relativistic sense. It takes million years for the Sun to make its way around the galaxy, so thirty years is only an eyeblink on the galactic clock.

But what a marvelous thirty years it has been! Mindful that our group was informal, junior and unchartered, I wanted to emphasize these notes were the beginning of a dialog and not an assertion of control. Today these RFCs have become the critical open standards that drive the development of the open Internet. There have been many more, too, with RFC just being the latest one published the list of most recent RFCs is always available. The RFC became the key mechanism for sharing technical designs in the Internet community and the archetype for other communities as well, Crocker wrote.

Request for Comments submissions to the Net standards body, Internet Engineering Task Force IETF , typically proposed standards for various plumbing specs of the now-ubiquitous network of networks.