RFC 2555

RFC 2555: 30 Years of RFCs 🎀

• Series: Network Working Group
• Author: RFC Editor, et al. (USC/ISI) 💖
• Category: Informational 🌸
• Date: 7 April 1999 🗓️
• Obsoletes/Updates: the header doesn't list anything this one obsoletes or updates 🦋

Status of this Memo ✨

bestie, this memo is just here to share info with the Internet community. it is not a standard of any kind 🙈 Distribution is unlimited, so share it with everyone 💅

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

1. Introduction - Robert Braden 🌈

okay so thirty years ago today, the very first Request for Comments doc, RFC 1, got published at UCLA (ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1.txt) 🍓 That was the start of a series that now has more than 2500 docs about computer networking. Jon Postel collected, archived, and edited the whole thing for 28 years 👑 Jon has left us, so this 30th anniversary tribute is basically a big hug of gratitude for everything he gave the series ✨

The rest of this doc has little recollections from the people who lived it. We've got the current RFC Editor, Joyce K. Reynolds, then three legends: Steve Crocker, who wrote RFC 1, Vint Cerf, whose long-range vision still guides us, and Jake Feinler, who was a huge part of the middle years of the series 🦋

2. Reflections - Joyce K. Reynolds 💖

Okay, picture this. Joyce is dabbling in IP network number and protocol parameter assignments with Jon Postel, back when gateways were still "dumb" 🙈 The Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) was a baby, and TOPS-20 was at its absolute peak. She knew about the Request for Comments (RFC) series, with Jon as the RFC Editor, but she had no clue what the job actually involved. It was Jon's job, and he just quietly kept publishing docs for the ARPANET community 🫶

Meanwhile, they'd have meetings in his office to go over the day's tasks. One day Joyce noticed a pile of folders on one side of his desk was growing. A few weeks later it had become two stacks 😭 She asked what they were, and yep, they were RFC submissions. Jon was trying to keep up with the flood 🌊

So she told him he should learn to let go and hand some work to other people. He listened really intently but didn't say anything 💅 The very next day, Jon rolled a computer stand into her office, stacked with those RFC-bound docs from his desk. He had a big Cheshire cat grin and went "I'm letting go!" and just walked off 🐱✨

On top of the stack was a big red three ring notebook: the "NLS Textbook", prepared at ISI by Jon, Lynne Sims and Linda Sato for ISI's TENEX and TOPS-20 systems. Reading it, Joyce learned that NLS was built to help people work with information on a computer. It had tons of tools, from simple commands for writing, reading and printing docs to fancy methods for retrieving and communicating information. NLS was the system Jon used to write, edit and create the RFCs, so that's how her RFC journey started 🎀

Computers and operating systems have changed a lot over the years, but Jon's obsession with consistent RFC style and quality never changed 🌸 Sadly, he didn't live to see the 30th anniversary of the series he nurtured so faithfully. Still, the spirit of the RFC series keeps going as we head into the new millennium, and honestly? Jon would be proud 🥹💜

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

RFC 1, "Host Software", came out thirty years ago on April 7, 1969. It laid out some thoughts and initial experiments. Steve says it was a modest, totally forgettable memo 💀 but it matters, because it was part of a big initiative whose impact we still feel today ✨

Back when RFC 1 was written, the ARPANET was still being designed. Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) had won the all-important contract to build and operate the Interface Message Processors, or "IMPs", the ancestors of modern routers 🤖 Each one was the size of a refrigerator and cost about $100,000 in 1969 dollars. Iconic, but also lowkey massive 😭

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

There had been plenty of planning for the topology, leased lines, modems and IMPs, but almost no organization or planning for network applications. It was just assumed the research sites would figure that part out 💅 Steve says this turned out to be a brilliant management decision at ARPA. Honestly, the vibes were immaculate 🔥

Back in the summer of 1968, a handful of grad students and staff from the four sites got together to talk about the upcoming network. There was only a basic outline. BBN hadn't won the contract yet, and there was no technical spec for how the network would run. At that first meeting, they scheduled future meetings at each of the other labs, which set the stage for today's thrice yearly movable feast 🍓 The group grew a lot, and they ended up with overflow crowds of fifty to a hundred people at Network Working Group meetings. Compared to modern IETF meetings around the world, with over 1,000 people and several dozen active working groups, the early Network Working Groups were small and tame. At the time, though, they felt huge and only barely manageable 🥹 One tradition that hasn't changed at all is the spirit of totally unrestrained participation in working group meetings 🙌

Their first group met a handful of times in summer and fall 1968 and winter 1969. Those early meetings weren't limited by knowing what the network would look like or how it would interact with hosts. Depending on how you see it, that either let them or forced them to think about broader, grander topics 🧚 They knew they'd eventually have to deal with message formats and other specific details of low-level protocols, but their first thoughts were about what applications the network might support. They thought the 50 kilobit per second communication lines planned for the ARPANET seemed slow, and they worried it might be hard to provide high-quality interactive service across the network. Steve's like, "I wish we had not been so accurate!" 😭💀

When BBN released its Host-IMP specification in spring 1969, their freedom to wander over broad, grand topics came to an end 🚫 Before that, though, they tried to consider the most general designs and the most exciting applications. One idea that really captured their imagination was downloading a small interpretive program at the start of a session. That program could then control the interactions and use the narrow bandwidth between the user's local machine and the back-end system efficiently 🧠 Jeff Rulifson at SRI was the prime mover behind this line of thinking, and he took a crack at designing a Decode-Encode Language (DEL) [RFC 5] 🦋 Michel Elie, who was visiting UCLA from France, pushed the idea further and published Proposal for a Network Interchange Language (NIL) [RFC 51] 💜 Steve says the emergence of Java and ActiveX in recent years finally brings those early ideas to fruition, and they're not done yet. He thinks we'll keep seeing striking advances in combining communication and computing ⚡

Steve has already suggested that the early RFCs and the Network Working Group laid the foundation for the Internet Engineering Task Force. Two all-important aspects of that early work deserve a mention, even though they're totally obvious to anyone who participates today 🌈 First, the technical direction from the very beginning was an open architecture built on multiple layers of protocol. Honestly, they were way too scared to imagine they could define an all-inclusive set of protocols that would serve forever 😅 They pictured a continual process of evolution and addition, and yep, that's exactly what happened 🥳

The RFCs also showed a certain sense of fear, ngl 🙈 After several months of meetings, they felt obliged to write their thoughts down. They split up the work and wrote the first batch of memos. Along with the technical design, Steve took on the admin job of setting up a simple scheme for numbering and distributing the notes. Since their group was informal, junior and uncharted, he wanted to emphasize that these notes were the start of a dialog, not an assertion of control 🫶

It's been thirty years since the first RFCs came out. At the time, Steve believed the notes were temporary and the whole 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, that 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 too. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and their worst fears 🧙‍♀️🔮

4. RFCs - The Great Conversation - Vint Cerf ✨

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

Okay, so, if we think about Earth orbiting the Sun and the Sun orbiting the Milky Way, that first network IS far away in the relativistic sense. It takes 200 million years for the Sun to get around the galaxy once, so thirty years is basically an eyeblink on the galactic clock. But what a marvelous thirty years it has been! 🎀 The RFCs document the whole odyssey of the ARPANET and then the Internet, as the creators and netizens explore, discover, build, rebuild, argue, and resolve design questions about computer networking, its concepts, and its applications. Main character energy, honestly. 💖

It's been so fascinating to watch the RFCs themselves change, from their earliest, tentative dialog form to today's much more structured look. 🦋 Applications like email, bulletin boards, and the world wide web had a lot to do with that shift, but so did the scale and impact of the Internet on our social and economic fabric. As the Internet became more economically important, the standards written up in the RFCs got more important too, and the RFCs got more formal. The dialog moved to other venues as technology changed and working styles adapted. 💅

Here's the thing hiding in the history of the RFCs: it's also the history of how human institutions get cooperative work done. 🫶 And there are some heroes in that history who never got the credit they deserved. On this thirtieth anniversary, I'm so grateful to finally shout some of them out. We could fill a whole book with names, mostly the authors of the RFCs, but since this has to be a brief contribution, I want to highlight four people in particular: Steve Crocker, Jon Postel, Joyce K. Reynolds, and Bob Braden. 👑

Steve Crocker is a modest man and would never point out that while the contents of RFC 1 might have been totally forgettable, the act of writing RFC 1 was a sign of the brave and ultimately clear-visioned leadership he brought to a journey into the unknown. 🧚 There were no guides back then. Computer networking was new, and there were very few historical milestones to prepare us for what was coming. Steve had a real gift for accommodating a whole range of views, synthesizing them into something coherent, and, like Tom Sawyer, persuading people that they wanted to spend their time working on the problems blocking progress. You can see that in the early RFCs and in the Network Working Group meetings Steve led. 🌸

When I worked on the later Internet stuff, I did my best to copy the framework Steve invented. ✨ The International Network Working Group (INWG) and its INWG Notes, and the Internet Working Group and its Internet Experiment Notes (IENs), were brazen knock-offs of Steve's organizational vision and style. Iconic copying, no shame. 😭

It's doubtful the RFCs would be the quality body of material they are today if Jonathan Postel hadn't been devoted to them from the very start. 💜 Somehow Jon knew, even thirty years ago, that it might matter to document what was done and why, not to mention capturing the debate for future networkers who'd be wondering how we reached some of the conclusions we did (and probably shaking their heads... 🙈).

Jon was the network's Boswell, but it was his devotion to quality, plus his remarkable mix of technical and editing skills, that runs through many of the more monumental RFCs about what we now consider the TCP/IP standards. 🔥 Lots of bad design decisions got reworked because Jon was so stubbornly determined that we all got it "right." As editor, he simply would not let anything go out that didn't pass his personal quality filter. There were times we moaned and complained and hollered and harangued, but in the end, most of the time, Jon was right, and we knew it. 🍓

Joyce K. Reynolds was at Jon's side for much of the time he was the RFC editor, and as people have observed, they worked in unison like a matched pair of superconducting electrons. Superconductors they were, for the RFC series! ⚡ For all practical purposes, it was impossible to tell which of the two had edited any particular RFC. Joyce's passion for quality has matched Jon's and continues to this day. She also has the same subtle, puckish sense of humor that popped out at unexpected moments during Jon's stewardship. One example that affected me personally was Joyce's assignment of number 2468 to the RFC written to remember Jon. I never would have thought of that, and she did it so subtly that it didn't even ring a bell until someone emailed me asking whether it was a coincidence. In analogy to classic mystery stories, the editor did it. 🕵️‍♀️💀

Another unsung hero of the RFC saga is Bob Braden, another man whose modesty hides contributions of long-standing and monumental proportions. 🌈 It's my speculation that much of the quality of the RFCs can be traced back to consultations among the USC/ISI team, including Jon, Joyce, and Bob, among others. Of course, RFC 1122 and 1123 stand as two enormous contributions to the clarity of the Internet standards. For that task alone, Bob deserves tremendous appreciation. He has also led the End-to-End Research Group for many years, and that group has produced some of the most important RFCs refining our understanding of optimal implementation of the protocols, especially TCP. 🦋

When the RFCs were first produced, they had an almost 19th century character: letters exchanged in public, debating the merits of various protocol design choices for the ARPANET. ✉️ As email and bulletin boards emerged from the fertile fabric of the network, the far-flung participants in this historic dialog started using the online medium to carry out the discussion. That reduced the need to document the debate in the RFCs, and in some ways it left historians a bit impoverished. RFCs slowly became conclusions rather than debates. 🥺

Jon allowed publication of items other than purely technical documents in this series. So you'll find poetry, humor (especially the April 1 RFCs, which are as funny today as they were when they were published), and reprints of valuable reference material mixed in with the documents prepared by the network working groups. 🤭🎀

In the early 1970s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency was running several parallel research programs into packet switching technology, after the stunning success of the idea in the ARPANET. 🚀 Among these were the Packet Radio Network, the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network, and the Internet projects. Each of them spawned note series akin to, but parallel with, the RFCs: PRNET Notes, ARPA Satellite System Notes (bearing the obvious and unfortunate acronym...), Internet Experiment Notes (IENs), and so on. 💀 After the Internet protocols were mandated for use on the ARPANET and other DARPA-sponsored networks in January 1983 (SATNET actually converted before that), Internet-related notes were merged into the RFC series. For a while, once the Internet project seemed destined to bear fruit, IENs were published in parallel with RFCs. A few voices, Danny Cohen's in particular (he was at USC/ISI with Jon Postel back then), suggested that separate series were a mistake and that it would be a lot easier to maintain and search a single series. Hindsight seems to have proven Danny right. The RFC series, with its dedicated editors, has held up over time far better than its more ephemeral counterparts. 👑✨

As the organizations associated with the Internet kept evolving, the RFCs adapted to changing circumstances. 🌸 Perhaps the most powerful influence is the evolution of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which started as just one of several task forces whose chairpersons formed the Internet Activities Board. It grew into the dominant, global Internet Standards development organization, managed by its Internet Engineering Steering Group and operating under the auspices of the Internet Society. The process of producing "standards-track" RFCs is now far more rigorous than it used to be. It carries much more impact on a booming industry, and it has spawned its own, relatively informal "Internet Drafts" series of short-lived documents that form the working set of the IETF working groups. 🧠

The dialogue that once defined the early RFCs has given way to thrice-annual face-to-face meetings of the IETF, enormous quantities of email, and a growing amount of group-interactive work through chat rooms, shared white boards, and even more elaborate multicast conferences. 💻 All that parallelism and the growing pile of transient dialogue around the Internet's evolution has made life considerably harder for technology historians. Still, you can sense a counterbalance in the phenomenal amount of information piling up on the World Wide Web. Even casual searches often turn up surprising, and sometimes embarrassing, old memoranda, many of which were once paper and have since been turned into bits by some enterprising volunteer. 🙈📚

The RFCs, which began so tentatively thirty years ago and were persistently edited and maintained by Jon Postel and his colleagues at USC/ISI, tell a remarkable story of exploration, achievement, and dedication. It's the story of a growing mass of internauts who will not sleep until the Internet truly is for everyone. 🌍💖 This remembrance is offered in that spirit, and in particular in memory of our much-loved colleague, Jon Postel. Without his personal commitment to this archive, the story might have turned out very differently, and not nearly as remarkably. 🫶

5. Reflecting on 30 years of RFCs - Jake Feinler 🎀

Okay, by now we all know that the first RFC was published on April 7, 1969 by Steve Crocker. 🧚 It was titled "Host Software." The second RFC was published on April 9, 1969 by Bill Duvall of SRI International (then called Stanford Research Institute or SRI), and it was also titled "Host Software." RFC 2 was a response to suggestions made in RFC 1--and so the dialog began. 🌸

Steve proposed two experiments in RFC 1:

"1)  SRI is currently modifying their on-line retrieval system which
will be the major software component of the Network Documentation
Center [or The SRI NIC as it soon came to be known] so that it can be
modified with Model 35 teletypes.  The control of the teletypes will
be written in DEL [Decode-Encode Language].  All sites will write DEL
compilers and use NLS [SRI Doug Engelbart's oNLine System] through
the DEL program".

"2)  SRI will write a DEL front end for full NLS, graphics included.
UCLA and UTAH will use NLS with graphics".

RFC 2, issued two days later, proposed detailed procedures for connecting to the NLS documentation system across the network. 💫 Steve may think RFC 1 was an "entirely forgettable" document, but as an information person, I beg to differ! 🙅‍♀️ The concepts in this first dialog were mind-boggling, and they eventually led to the kind of network interchange we're all using on the web today. (Fortunately, we've graduated beyond DEL and Model 35 teletypes! 😭🔥)

RFC 1 was, I believe, a paper document. RFC 2 was produced online via the SRI NLS system and entered into the online SRI NLS Journal. 💜 However, it was probably mailed to each recipient via snail mail by the NIC, since email and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) had not yet been invented. 🐌✉️

okay so RFC 3 is where things get juicy 💅 Steve Crocker wrote it and it was called "Documentation Conventions" 🎀 and honestly? the need for a few ground rules was already showing up. this one introduced some super iconic concepts 🦋 it said:

"The Network Working Group (NWG) is concerned with the HOST software, the strategies for using the network, and the initial experiments with the network. Documentation of the NWG's effort is through notes such as this. Notes may be produced at any site by anybody and included in this series".

and then it kept going 👀

"The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion, etc.related to the Host software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or background explanation, and explicit questions without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for a NWG note is one sentence".

the vibe is literally "ship it, it doesn't have to be perfect" 😭🫶

"These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition".

bestie this is so relatable 🥺 nobody wants to post the messy draft, so they wrote it down to make it okay 💖

Steve asked that this RFC be sent to a distribution list made up of:

• Bob Kahn, BBN
• Larry Roberts, ARPA
• Steve Carr, UCLA
• Jeff Rulifson, UTAH
• Ron Stoughton, UCSB
• Steve Crocker, UCLA

so by the time RFC 3 dropped, a bunch of the ideas for how to do business in this brand new networking world were already locked in ✨ there'd be a working group of implementers (the NWG) actually talking things through and trying stuff out 🧚 ideas were free-wheeling, communication was informal, documents got deposited at the NIC (online when possible) and shared freely with working group members, and anyone with something to add was invited to the party 🎉 with this one document, a whole swath got cut through miles of red tape and pedantic process 🔪 was this radical for the times or what?! and we were only up to RFC 3!! 😭🔥

more RFCs followed, and the SRI NLS Journal became the bibliographic search service of the ARPANET 📚 it was different from other search services of the time in one big way: when you got a "hit" searching the journal online, you didn't just get a citation with the author and title, you also got a little string of text called a "link" 🔗 if you used a command called "jump to link", voila! you got the full text of the document 💅 you didn't have to go to the library or mail off an order to some issuing agency like everyone else had to do. the whole document was right there, instantly 🤯

also, any document submitted to the journal could not be changed 🔒 new versions could be submitted, and those superseded the old ones, but the new versions couldn't be changed either. every document got its own unique identifying number, so it was easy to track 🏷️ this was super useful in a fast-moving environment, because documents often went through several drafts before they were finally issued as an RFC or some other official document, and being able to track versions was a total lifesaver 🙌

the SRI NLS Journal was revolutionary for its time, but getting to it online came with some operational problems 😬 host computers were small and crowded, and the network was growing by leaps and bounds, so connections had to be timed out and broken so everyone got a turn 🔁 also, the rest of the world was still a paper world (and there were no scanners or laser printers, folks!), so the NIC still did a brisk business sending paper documents to requestors 📬

by 1972, when I became Principal Investigator for the NIC project, the ARPANET was growing fast and more and more hosts were getting attached to it 🌈 each host was required to have a technical contact known as the Technical Liaison, and most of the Liaisons were also members of the NWG 🫶 each Liaison got a set of documents from the NIC called "functional documents", which included the Protocol Handbook (first issued by BBN and later published by the NIC). the Protocol Handbook was made up of key RFCs plus a document called "BBN 1822", which specified the Host-to-Imp protocol 📖

the NWG told the NIC which documents should go in the handbook, and the NIC assembled, published, and distributed the book 💜 Alex McKenzie of BBN helped the NIC with the first version of the handbook, but soon a young fellow, fresh out of grad school, named Jon Postel joined the NWG and became the NIC's contact and ARPA's spokesperson for what should be issued in the Protocol Handbook 🧑‍💻✨

no one who knows the RFCs can think of them without thinking of Dr. Jonathan Postel 👑 he was "Mister RFC" to most of us 🎀 Jon worked at SRI in the seventies and had the office next to mine 🥹 we were both members of Doug Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center 🧠 Jon was a brilliant computer scientist, and he also cared deeply about the process of spreading information and building a methodology for working in a networking environment 💖 we'd have conversations way into the wee hours about ways to do this "right" 🌙 the network owes Jon a huge debt of gratitude for his dedication to keeping the RFCs going 🙏 his work, along with that of his staff, the NWG, the IETF, the various NICs, and CNRI, to keep this set of documents viable over the years was, and still is, a labor of love 💕

Jon left SRI in 1976 to join USC-ISI 🦋 but by then the die was cast, and the RFCs, NWG, Liaisons, and the NIC were part of how the network did business 🌸 the SRI NLS Journal system was getting too big for its host computer, though, and it couldn't handle the number of users trying to get in 😵 email and FTP had been implemented by then, so the NIC came up with a way to deliver information to users through distributed information servers across the network 📨 a user could request an RFC by email from their host computer and have it automatically delivered to their mailbox ✨ users could also buy hardcopy subscriptions to the RFCs and copies of the Protocol Handbook if they didn't have network access 📦

the NIC worked with Jon, ARPA, DCA, NSF, other NICs, and other agencies to make secondary reference sets of RFCs easily accessible to implementers all over the world 🌍 the RFCs were also shared freely with official standards bodies, manufacturers and vendors, other working groups, and universities 🤝 none of the RFCs were ever restricted or classified 🔓 which is a total power move when you think about it, since they were funded by DoD during the height of the Cold War 🥶

many of us worked super hard in the early days to establish the RFCs as the official set of technical notes for developing the Internet 💪 it was NOT easy 😤 there were suggestions for lots of parallel efforts and splinter groups, and there were naysayers all along the way, because this was a new way of doing things and the ARPANET was "coloring outside the lines" so to speak 🎨 Jon, as Editor-in-Chief, got criticized because the RFCs weren't issued by an "official" standards body, and the NIC got criticized because it wasn't an "official" document issuing agency 🙄 we both tried to marry the new way of doing business with the old, and we were mostly backed by our government sponsors, who were breaking new ground themselves 🫡

a lot of RFCs were the end result of months of heated discussion and implementation 🔥 authoring one wasn't for the faint of heart 😭 feelings ran high about what the "right" way to go was, and heated arguments sometimes broke out 💀 usually they stayed about substance, but sometimes they got personal 🙈 Jon would often step in and arbitrate ⚖️ eventually the NWG or the Sponsors had to say, "It's a wrap. Issue a final RFC" 🎬 Jon, as Editor-in-Chief of the RFCs, often took merciless flak from people who wanted to keep discussing and implementing, or from people whose ideas got left on the cutting room floor ✂️ somehow he always got past these controversies with style and grace and moved on 💅 we owe him, and everyone else who served on the NWG or authored RFCs, an extreme debt of gratitude for their contributions and dedication 💖

the controversy was at its worst when DoD adopted TCP/IP as its official host-to-host protocols for communications networks 🚨 in March 1982, the Under Secretary of Defense, Richard DeLauer, issued a military directive 📜 it simply stated that the use of TCP and IP was mandatory for DoD communications networks 😳 bear in mind that a military directive is not something you discuss, because the time for discussion is long over once one is issued 🙅‍♀️ a military directive is something you DO 🫡 the ARPANET and its successor, the Defense Data Network, were military networks, so the gauntlet was thrown down and the race was on to prove whether the new technology could actually do the job on a real operational network 🏁 you have no idea what chaos and controversy that little 2-page directive caused on the network 🌪️ (but that's a story for another time 🙊) still, that directive, along with RFCs 791 and 793 (IP and TCP), gave the RFCs as a group of technical documents stature and recognition all over the world 👑 (and yes, TCP/IP absolutely did do the job! 💯)

Jon and I were both government contractors, so of course we followed the directions of our contracting officers 📋 he was mainly under contract to ARPA, while the NIC was mainly under contract to DCA 🤓 BBN was another key contractor 🏢 for the most part we all worked as a team 🫶 but military personnel assigned to both the ARPANET and the DDN turned over pretty often, so we all collaborated to get the new participants up to speed on what was available to them when they joined the network 🧃 we also tried to encourage collaboration instead of duplication of effort, when it made sense 💡 the NWG (or the IETF, as it's known now) and the RFCs became the main vehicles for interagency collaboration as the DoD protocols started being used on other government, academic, and commercial networks 🌐

I left SRI and the NIC project in 1989 🥲 at that point there were about 30,000 hosts on what was becoming known as the Internet, and just over 1000 RFCs had been issued 📈 today there are millions of hosts on the Internet, and we're well past the 3000 mark for RFCs 🚀 it was SO much fun to be part of what turned out to be a technological revolution 🎉 it's heartwarming to see that RFCs are still being issued by the IETF, and that they're still largely based on ideas that have been discussed and implemented 🥹 the online working groups and distributed information servers are a way of life now 🌸 those little "links" (officially known as hypertext) have totally revolutionized how documents get delivered ✨ and government, academia, and business are all playing the same game now, for fun and profit 💰 (oh yes, I'm happy to see that Steve's idea for integrated text and graphics has finally come to fruition, although that work took a little longer than 2 days 😭🖼️)

6. Favorite RFCs -- The First 30 Years - Celeste Anderson ✨

okay so five years before this, Jon Postel and Celeste (me!) wanted to publish a 25th anniversary RFC book 📚, but they were both buried in other projects 😭. so they decided the 30th anniversary would be the one, with thirty "RFC Editors' Choice" RFCs picked from the original ideas across the first 30 years of RFCs 🌸

Jon passed away in October 1998 💔, so that goal never got finished. they did start putting some of the early RFCs online though, RFC 1 included 🥹 They weren't sure if they should make the pages look exactly like the typewritten originals or tidy them up to match the latest RFC style 🤔 If you still have a paper copy of RFC 1, you'll totally notice the little compromises they made for the NROFF version 🙈 The hand-drawn diagrams from the early days were also a whole puzzle to turn into ASCII 🎨

the RFC Editor still needs help getting more early RFCs online 🫶 Check http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-online.html if you want to get involved!

in memory of Jon, they're putting together a book coming out next year called "Favorite RFCs -- The First 30 Years" 🦋 this one is for him 🕯️💜

you can vote on the web interface at

http://www.rfc-editor.org/voterfc.html

which tabulates votes and records responses 🗳️ email votes are welcome too, just send them to voterfc@isi.edu 📧 they'd really love votes that come with an explanation for the choice, so bring your best reasons 💅

they also reserve the right to add a few RFCs to the list that Jon had already picked for the collection, which is so him 👑 voting closes December 31, 1999 ⭐ don't miss it!

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7. Security Considerations 🔐

this commemorative RFC doesn't discuss any security issues 🙈

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8. Acknowledgments 🫶

huge thank you to all the authors who contributed to this RFC on super short notice 💖 Fred Baker and Eve Schooler deserve a shoutout too, because they're the ones who goaded everyone into action 🔥 And a special acknowledgment to Eitetsu Baumgardner, a student at USC 🎓 He NROFFed this document, helped format RFCs 1, 54, and 62, and converted hand-drawn diagrams into ASCII format. absolute legend 👑✨

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9. Authors' Addresses 🎀

here's where you can find everyone who worked on this one 💌

Robert Braden
USC/Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way #1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Phone:  +1 310-822-1511
Fax:    +1 310 823 6714
EMail:  braden@isi.edu


Joyce K. Reynolds
USC/Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way #1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Phone:  +1 310-822-1511
Fax:    +1 310-823-6714
EMail:  jkrey@isi.edu


Steve Crocker
Steve Crocker Associates, LLC
5110 Edgemoor Lane
Bethesda, MD 20814

Phone:   +1 301-654-4569
Fax:     +1 202-478-0458
EMail:   crocker@mbl.edu

Vint Cerf
MCI

EMail: vcerf@mci.net


Jake Feinler
SRI Network Information Center
1972-1989

EMail: feinler@juno.com


Celeste Anderson
USC/Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way #1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Phone:  +1 310-822-1511
Fax:    +1 310-823-6714
EMail:  celeste@isi.edu

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10. APPENDIX - RFC 1 🧚

okay this is the vintage moment 🕰️✨ here's how the cover page of RFC 1 looked:

The cover page said at the top:

"Network Working Group
 Request for Comments"

and then came an internal UCLA distribution list:

V. Cerf, S. Crocker, M. Elie, G. Estrin, G. Fultz, A. Gomez,
D. Karas, L. Kleinrock, J. Postel, M. Wingfield, R. Braden,
and W. Kehl.

followed by an "Off Campus" distribution list:

A. Bhushan (MIT), S. Carr (Utah), G. Cole (SDC), W. English (SRI),
K. Fry (Mitre), J. Heafner (Rand), R. Kahn (BBN), L. Roberts (ARPA),
P. Rovner (MIT), and R. Stoughton (UCSB).

the following title page had

"Network Working Group
 Request for Comments: 1"

at the top, and then:

            HOST SOFTWARE

            STEVE CROCKER
            7 APRIL 1969

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11. Full Copyright Statement ⚖️

the legal part, so I'm keeping the exact wording so nothing gets lost in translation 🫶

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

This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished
to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise
explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied,
published and distributed, in whole or in part, without
restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice
and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative
works.  However, this document itself may not be modified in any
way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to the
Internet Society or other Internet organizations, except as needed
for the purpose of developing Internet standards in which case the
procedures for copyrights defined in the Internet Standards
process must be followed, or as required to translate it into
languages other than English.

The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not
be revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.

This document and the information contained herein is provided on
an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET
ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF
THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

that's the whole RFC, bestie 🌈💖