rfc1000.txt

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Network Working Group                                        J. Reynolds
Request for Comments: 1000                                     J. Postel
                                                                     ISI
                                                             August 1987

Obsoletes: RFCs 084, 100, 160, 170, 200, 598, 699, 800, 899, 999


                THE REQUEST FOR COMMENTS REFERENCE GUIDE


STATUS OF THIS MEMO

   This RFC is a reference guide for the Internet community which
   summarizes of all the Request for Comments issued between April 1969
   and March 1987.  This guide also categorizes the RFCs by topic.

INTRODUCTION

   This RFC Reference Guide is intended to provide a historical account
   by categorizing and summarizing of the Request for Comments numbers 1
   through 999 issued between the years 1969-1987.  These documents have
   been crossed referenced to indicate which RFCs are current, obsolete,
   or revised.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

THE ORIGINS OF RFCS - by Stephen D. Crocker

   The DDN community now includes hundreds of nodes and thousands of
   users, but once it was all a gleam in Larry Roberts' eye.  While much
   of the development proceeded according to a grand plan, the design of
   the protocols and the creation of the RFCs was largely accidental.

   The procurement of the ARPANET was initiated in the summer of 1968 --
   Remember Vietnam, flower children, etc?  There had been prior
   experiments at various ARPA sites to link together computer systems,
   but this was the first version to explore packet-switching on a grand
   scale.  ("ARPA" didn't become "DARPA" until 1972.)  Unlike most of
   the ARPA/IPTO procurements of the day, this was a competitive
   procurement. The contract called for four IMPs to be delivered to
   UCLA, SRI, UCSB and The University of Utah.  These sites were running
   a Sigma 7 with the SEX operating system, an SDS 940 with the Genie
   operating system, an IBM 360/75 with OS/MVT (or perhaps OS/MFT), and
   a DEC PDP-10 with the Tenex operating system.  Options existed for
   additional nodes if the first experiments were successful.  BBN won
   the procurement in December 1968, but that gets ahead of this story.

   Part of the reason for selecting these four sites was these were
   existing ARPA computer science research contractors.  The precise
   usage of the ARPANET was not spelled out in advance, and the research
   community could be counted on to take some initiative.  To stimulate
   this process, a meeting was called during the summer with
   representatives from the selected sites, chaired by Elmer Shapiro


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RFC 1000 - Request for Comments Reference Guide              August 1987


   from SRI.  If memory serves me correctly, Jeff Rulifson came from
   SRI, Ron Stoughton from UCSB, Steve Carr from Utah and I came from
   UCLA. (Apologies to anyone I've left out; records are inaccessible or
   lost at this point.)  At this point we knew only that the network was
   coming, but the precise details weren't known.

   That first meeting was seminal.  We had lots of questions -- how IMPs
   and hosts would be connected, what hosts would say to each other, and
   what applications would be supported.  No one had any answers, but
   the prospects seemed exciting.  We found ourselves imagining all
   kinds of possibilities -- interactive graphics, cooperating
   processes, automatic data base query, electronic mail -- but no one
   knew where to begin.  We weren't sure whether there was really room
   to think hard about these problems; surely someone from the east
   would be along by and by to bring the word.  But we did come to one
   conclusion: We ought to meet again.  Over the next several months, we
   managed to parlay that idea into a series of exchange meetings at
   each of our sites, thereby setting the most important precedent in
   protocol design.

   The first few meetings were quite tenuous.  We had no official
   charter.  Most of us were graduate students and we expected that a
   professional crew would show up eventually to take over the problems
   we were dealing with.  Without clear definition of what the host-IMP
   interface would look like, or even what functions the IMP would
   provide, we focused on exotic ideas.  We envisioned the possibility
   of application specific protocols, with code downloaded to user
   sites, and we took a crack at designing a language to support this.
   The first version was known as DEL, for "Decode-Encode Language" and
   a later version was called NIL, for "Network Interchange Language."
   When the IMP contract was finally let and BBN provided some definite
   information on the host-IMP interface, all attention shifted to
   low-level matters and the ambitious ideas for automatic downloading
   of code evaporated.  It was several years before ideas like remote
   procedure calls and typed objects reappeared.

   In February of 1969 we met for the first time with BBN.  I don't
   think any of us were prepared for that meeting.  The BBN folks, led
   by Frank Heart, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein and Will Crowther, found
   themselves talking to a crew of graduate students they hadn't
   anticipated.  And we found ourselves talking to people whose first
   concern was how to get bits to flow quickly and reliably but hadn't
   -- of course -- spent any time considering the thirty or forty layers
   of protocol above the link level.  And while BBN didn't take over the
   protocol design process, we kept expecting that an official protocol
   design team would announce itself.

   A month later, after a particularly delightful meeting in Utah, it
   became clear to us that we had better start writing down our


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   discussions.  We had accumulated a few notes on the design of DEL and
   other matters, and we decided to put them together in a set of notes.
   I remember having great fear that we would offend whomever the
   official protocol designers were, and I spent a sleepless night
   composing humble words for our notes.  The basic ground rules were
   that anyone could say anything and that nothing was official.  And to
   emphasize the point, I labeled the notes "Request for Comments."  I
   never dreamed these notes would distributed through the very medium
   we were discussing in these notes.  Talk about Sorcerer's Apprentice!

   Over the spring and summer of 1969 we grappled with the detailed
   problems of protocol design.  Although we had a vision of the vast
   potential for intercomputer communication, designing usable protocols
   was another matter.  A custom hardware interface and custom intrusion
   into the operating system was going to be required for anything we
   designed, and we anticipated serious difficulty at each of the sites.
   We looked for existing abstractions to use.  It would have been
   convenient if we could have made the network simply look like a tape
   drive to each host, but we knew that wouldn't do.

   It was clear we needed to support remote login for interactive use --
   later known as Telnet -- and we needed to move files from machine to
   machine.  We also knew that we needed a more fundamental point of
   view for building a larger array of protocols.  Unfortunately,
   operating systems of that era tended to view themselves as the center
   of the universe; symmetric cooperation did not fit into the concepts
   currently available within these operating systems.  And time was
   pressing: The first IMP was due to be delivered to UCLA September 1,
   1969, and the rest were scheduled at monthly intervals.

   At UCLA we scrambled to build a host-IMP interface.  SDS, the builder
   of the Sigma 7, wanted many months and many dollars to do the job.
   Mike Wingfield, another grad student at UCLA, stepped in and offered
   to get interface built in six weeks for a few thousand dollars.  He
   had a gorgeous, fully instrumented interface working in five and one
   half weeks.  I was in charge of the software, and we were naturally
   running a bit late.  September 1 was Labor Day, so I knew I had a
   couple of extra days to debug the software.  Moreover, I had heard
   BBN was having some timing troubles with the software, so I had some
   hope they'd miss the ship date.  And I figured that first some
   Honeywell people would install the hardware -- IMPs were built out of
   Honeywell 516s in those days -- and then BBN people would come in a
   few days later to shake down the software.  An easy couple of weeks
   of grace.

   BBN fixed their timing trouble, air shipped the IMP, and it arrived
   on our loading dock on Saturday, August 30.  They arrived with the
   IMP, wheeled it into our computer room, plugged it in and the



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RFC 1000 - Request for Comments Reference Guide              August 1987


   software restarted from where it had been when the plug was pulled in
   Cambridge.  Still Saturday, August 30.  Panic time at UCLA.

   The second IMP was delivered to SRI at the beginning of October, and
   ARPA's interest was intense.  Larry Roberts and Barry Wessler came by
   for a visit on November 21, and we actually managed to demonstrate a
   Telnet-like connection to SRI.

   With the pressure to get something working and the general confusion
   as to how to achieve the high generality we all aspired to, we punted
   and defined the first set of protocols to include only Telnet and FTP
   functions.  In particular, only asymmetric, user-server relationships
   were supported.  In December 1969, we met with Larry Roberts in Utah,
   and suffered our first direct experience with "redirection".  Larry
   made it abundantly clear that our first step was not big enough, and
   we went back to the drawing board.  Over the next few months we
   designed a symmetric host-host protocol, and we defined an abstract
   implementation of the protocol known as the Network Control Program.
   ("NCP" later came to be used as the name for the protocol, but it
   originally meant the program within the operating system that managed
   connections.  The protocol itself was known blandly only as the
   host-host protocol.)  Along with the basic host-host protocol, we
   also envisioned a hierarchy of protocols, with Telnet, FTP and some
   splinter protocols as the first examples.  If we had only consulted
   the ancient mystics, we would have seen immediately that seven layers
   were required.

   The initial experiment had been declared an immediate success and the
   network continued to grow.  More and more people started coming to
   meetings, and the Network Working Group began to take shape.  Working
   Group meetings started to have 50 and 100 people in attendance
   instead of the half dozen we had had in 1968 and early 1969.  We held
   one meeting in conjunction with the Spring Joint Computer Conference
   in Atlantic City in 1971.  In October 1971 we all convened at MIT for
   a major protocol "fly-off".  Representatives from each site were on
   hand, and everyone tried to log in to everyone else's site.  With the
   exception of one site that was completely down, the matrix was almost
   completely filled in, and we had reached a major milestone in
   connectivity.

   The rapid growth of the network and the working group also led to a
   large pile of RFCs.  When the 100th RFC was in sight, Peggy Karp took
   on the task of indexing them.  That seemed like a large task then,
   and we could have hardly anticipated seeing more than a 1000 RFCs
   several years later.

   Where will it end?  The network has the exceeded all estimates of its
   growth.  It has been transformed, extended, cloned, renamed and
   reimplemented.  I doubt if there is a single computer still on the


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RFC 1000 - Request for Comments Reference Guide              August 1987


   network that was on it in 1971.  But the RFCs march on.  Maybe I'll
   write a few words for RFC 10,000.

REQUEST FOR COMMENTS BY CATEGORIES

   The RFCs are categorized into several broad groups and within these
   groups are subdivided by topic.  For example, the RFCs relating to
   file transfer are in 5 (Applications) c (File Transfer).

   1.  Administrative

      1a.  Assigned Numbers RFCs

         997, 990, 960, 943, 923, 900, 870, 820, 790, 776, 770, 762,
         758, 755, 750, 739, 717, 604, 503, 433, 349, 322, 317, 204,
         179, 175, 167.

      1b.  Official Protocols RFCs

         991, 961, 944, 924, 901, 880, 840, 694, 661, 617, 582, 580,
         552.
         774 - Internet Protocol Handbook Table of Contents

      1c.  Meeting Notes and Minutes

         898 - Gateway Special Interest Group Meeting Notes
         808, 805, 469 - Computer Mail Meeting Notes
         910, 807 - Multimedia Mail Meeting Notes
         585 - ARPANET Users Interest Working Group Meeting
         549, 396, 282, 253 - Graphics Meeting Notes
         371 - International Computer Communications Conference
         327 - Data and File Transfer Workshop Notes
         316 - Data Management Working Group Meeting Report
         164, 131, 116, 108, 101, 082, 077, 066, 063, 037, 021 - Network
               Working Group Meeting

      1d.  Meeting Announcements and Group Overviews

         828 - Data Communications:  IFIP's International "Network" of
               Experts
         631 - Call for Papers:  International Meeting on Minicomputers
               and Data Communication
         584 - Charter for ARPANET Users Interest Working Group
         537 - Announcement of NGG Meeting
         526 - Technical Meeting - Digital Image Processing Software
               Systems
         504 - Workshop Announcement
         483 - Cancellation of the Resource Notebook Framework Meeting
         474, 314, 246, 232, 134 - Network Graphics Working Group


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         471 - Announcement of a (Tentative) Workshop on Multi-Site
               Executive Programs
         461 - Telnet Meeting Announcement
         457 - TIPUG
         456 - Memorandum
         454 - File Transfer Protocol Meeting Announcement
         453 - Meeting Announcement to Discuss a Network Mail System
         374 - IMP System Announcement
         359 - The Status of the Release of the New IMP System (2600)
         343, 331 - IMP System Change Notification
         324 - RJE Protocol Meeting
         323 - Formation of Network Measurement Group (NMG)
         320 - Workshop on Hard Copy Line Graphics
         309 - Data and File Transfer Workshop Announcement
         299 - Information Management System
         295 - Report of the Protocol Workshop
         291, 188, 173 - Data Management Meetings
         245, 234, 207, 188, 173, 140, 116, 099, 087, 085, 075, 043, 035
               - Network Working Group Meetings
         222 - System Programmer's Workshop
         212 - NWG Meeting on Network Usage