Happy Birthday RFCs – The RFC Celebrates 40th Anniversary

On this day in 1969, 20 years before the birth of the World Wide Web, the first Request for Comments (RFC) document was published in the series that has documented Internet standards, practices, and technical history for the past four decades.

Writing in today’s New York Times, Steve Croker – one of the founders of the Internet and the author of RFC 1 – pays tribute to the “humble documents [that] shape the Internet’s inner workings and have played a significant role in its success.”

Steve, who is also a former member of ISOC’s Board of Trustees, was one of a group of graduate students and University staff who realized the importance of documenting their work in networking a small group of research centers. Steve volunteered to organize the notes.

Those first plain notes, which preceded email, were paper documents, mailed to all participating groups. The electronic archive of the RFCs, managed and maintained by the RFC Editor, now contains more than 5,500 documents.

Steve’s excellent article, which helps preserve an important piece of Internet history, is available on the New York Times web site.

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James A. Restucci is the author of this blog. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internal License.

2 Responses to Happy Birthday RFCs – The RFC Celebrates 40th Anniversary

  1. jimr says:

    In his mind he did [:)]

  2. TVNews says:

    That’s funny…

    I thought Al Gore invented the Internet.