rfc2555.txt

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Network Working Group                                 RFC Editor, et al.
Request for Comments: 2555                                       USC/ISI
Category: Informational                                     7 April 1999


                            30 Years of RFCs

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999).  All Rights Reserved.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction.................................................. 2
   2.  Reflections................................................... 2
   3.  The First Pebble: Publication of RFC 1........................ 3
   4.  RFCs - The Great Conversation................................. 5
   5.  Reflecting on 30 years of RFCs................................ 9
   6.  Favorite RFCs -- The First 30 Years...........................14
   7.  Security Considerations.......................................15
   8.  Acknowledgments...............................................15
   9.  Authors' Addresses............................................15
   10. APPENDIX - RFC 1..............................................17
   11. Full Copyright Statement......................................18





















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1. Introduction - Robert Braden

   Thirty years ago today, the first Request for Comments document,
   RFC 1, was published at UCLA (ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1.txt).
   This was the first of a series that currently contains more than 2500
   documents on computer networking, collected, archived, and edited by
   Jon Postel for 28 years.  Jon has left us, but this 30th anniversary
   tribute to the RFC series is assembled in grateful admiration for his
   massive contribution.

   The rest of this document contains a brief recollection from the
   present RFC Editor Joyce K. Reynolds, followed by recollections from
   three pioneers: Steve Crocker who wrote RFC 1, Vint Cerf whose long-
   range vision continues to guide us, and Jake Feinler who played a key
   role in the middle years of the RFC series.

2. Reflections - Joyce K. Reynolds

   A very long time ago when I was dabbling in IP network number and
   protocol parameter assignments with Jon Postel, gateways were still
   "dumb", the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) was in its infancy and
   TOPS-20 was in its heyday.  I was aware of the Request for Comments
   (RFCs) document series, with Jon as the RFC Editor.  I really didn't
   know much of the innerworkings of what the task entailed.  It was
   Jon's job and he quietly went about publishing documents for the
   ARPANET community.

   Meanwhile, Jon and I would have meetings in his office to go over our
   specific tasks of the day.  One day, I began to notice that a pile of
   folders sitting to one side of his desk seemed to be growing.  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!", and walked away.

   At the top of the stack was a big red three ring notebook.  Inside
   contained the "NLS Textbook", which was prepared at ISI by Jon, Lynne
   Sims and Linda Sato for use on ISI's TENEX and TOPS-20 systems.  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



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   and printing documents to sophisticated methods for retrieving and
   communication information.  NLS was the system Jon used to write,
   edit and create the RFCs.  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.

3. The First Pebble: Publication of RFC 1 - Steve Crocker

   RFC 1, "Host Software", issued thirty years ago on April 7, 1969
   outlined some thoughts and initial experiments.  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.

   At the time RFC 1 was written, the ARPANET was still under design.
   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.  They were each the size of a
   refrigerator and cost about $100,000 in 1969 dollars.

   The network was scheduled to be deployed among the research sites
   supported by ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).
   The first four nodes were to be at UCLA, SRI, University of
   California, Santa Barbara and University of Utah.  The first
   installation, at UCLA, was set for September 1, 1969.

   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 1968, 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.  Compared to modern IETF meetings all over the world with
   attendance in excess of 1,000 people and several dozen active working



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   groups, the early Network Working Groups were small and tame, but
   they seemed large and only barely manageable at the time.  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
   1968 and winter 1969.  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!

   When BBN issued its Host-IMP specification in spring 1969, our
   freedom to wander over broad and grand topics ended.  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. Jeff Rulifson at SRI was the prime mover of this
   line of thinking, and he took a crack at designing a Decode-Encode
   Language (DEL) [RFC 5].  Michel Elie, visiting at UCLA from France,
   worked on this idea further and published Proposal for a Network
   Interchange Language (NIL) [RFC 51].  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.

   I have already suggested that the early RFCs and the associated
   Network Working Group laid the foundation for the Internet
   Engineering Task Force.  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.






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   The RFCs themselves also represented a certain sense of fear.  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.

4. RFCs - The Great Conversation - Vint Cerf

   A long time ago, in a network far, far away...

   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 200 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! The
   RFCs document the odyssey of the ARPANET and, later, the Internet, as
   its creators and netizens explore, discover, build, re-build, argue
   and resolve questions of design, concepts and applications of
   computer networking.

   It has been ultimately fascinating to watch the transformation of the
   RFCs themselves from their earliest, tentative dialog form to today's
   much more structured character. The growth of applications such as
   email, bulletin boards and the world wide web have had much to do
   with that transformation, but so has the scale and impact of the
   Internet on our social and economic fabric. As the Internet has taken
   on greater economic importance, the standards documented in the RFCs
   have become more important and the RFCs more formal. The dialog has
   moved to other venues as technology has changed and the working
   styles have adapted.







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   Hiding in the history of the RFCs is the history of human
   institutions for achieving cooperative work. And also hiding in that
   history are some heroes that haven't been acknowledged.  On this
   thirtieth anniversary, I am grateful for the opportunity to
   acknowledge some of them. It would be possible to fill a book with
   such names - mostly of the authors of the RFCs, but as this must be a
   brief contribution, I want to mention four of them in particular:
   Steve Crocker, Jon Postel, Joyce K. Reynolds and Bob Braden.

   Steve Crocker is a modest man and would likely never make the
   observation that while the contents of RFC 1 might have been entirely
   forgettable, the act of writing RFC 1 was indicative of the brave and
   ultimately clear-visioned leadership that he brought to a journey
   into the unknown. There were no guides in those days - computer
   networking was new and few historical milestones prepared us for what
   lay ahead. Steve's ability to accommodate a diversity of views, to
   synthesize them into coherence and, like Tom Sawyer, to persuade
   others that they wanted to devote their time to working on the
   problems that lay in the path of progress can be found in the early
   RFCs and in the Network Working Group meetings that Steve led.

   In the later work on Internet, I did my best to emulate the framework
   that Steve invented: the International Network Working Group (INWG)
   and its INWG Notes, the Internet Working Group and its Internet
   Experiment Notes (IENs) were brazen knock-offs of Steve's
   organizational vision and style.

   It is doubtful that the RFCs would be the quality body of material
   they are today were it not for Jonathan Postel's devotion to them
   from the start. Somehow, Jon knew, even thirty years ago that it
   might be important to document what was done and why, to say nothing
   of trying to capture the debate for the benefit of future networkers
   wondering how we'd reached some of the conclusions we did (and
   probably shake their heads...).

   Jon was the network's Boswell, but it was his devotion to quality and
   his remarkable mix of technical and editing skills that permeate many
   of the more monumental RFCs that dealt with what we now consider the
   TCP/IP standards. Many bad design decisions were re-worked thanks to
   Jon's stubborn determination that we all get it "right" - as the
   editor, he simply would not let something go out that didn't meet his
   personal quality filter. There were times when we moaned and
   complained, hollered and harangued, but in the end, most of the time,
   Jon was right and we knew it.







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