[LINK] First RFC

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

How the Internet Got Its Rules 

By STEPHEN D. CROCKER Published: April 6, 2009 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html?ref=internet


First 'Request for Comment' document, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1
 

TODAY is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40th 
anniversary of what is known as the Request for Comments. Outside the 
technical community, not many people know about the R.F.C.’s, but these 
humble documents shape the Internet’s inner workings and have played a 
significant role in its success. 

When the R.F.C.’s were born, there wasn’t a World Wide Web. Even by the 
end of 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking four computers 
at four research centers: the University of California, Los Angeles; the 
Stanford Research Institute; the University of California, Santa Barbara; 
and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. 

The government financed the network and the hundred or fewer computer 
scientists who used it. It was such a small community that we all got to 
know one another.

A great deal of deliberation and planning had gone into the network’s 
underlying technology, but no one had given a lot of thought to what we 
would actually do with it. 

So, in August 1968, a handful of graduate students and staff members from 
the four sites began meeting intermittently, in person, to try to figure 
it out. (I was lucky enough to be one of the U.C.L.A. students included 
in these wide-ranging discussions.) It wasn’t until the next spring that 
we realized we should start writing down our thoughts. We thought maybe 
we’d put together a few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, 
the rules by which computers exchange information. I offered to organize 
our early notes.

What was supposed to be a simple chore turned out to be a nerve-racking 
project. Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I 
worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or 
asserting authority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath of some 
prestigious professor at some phantom East Coast establishment. I was 
actually losing sleep over the whole thing, and when I finally tackled my 
first memo, which dealt with basic communication between two computers, 
it was in the wee hours of the morning. I had to work in a bathroom so as 
not to disturb the friends I was staying with, who were all asleep.

Still fearful of sounding presumptuous, I labeled the note a “Request for 
Comments.” R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions 
unanswered, and soon became obsolete. 

But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the 
formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there 
are more than 5,000, all readily available online.

But we started writing these notes before we had e-mail, or even before 
the network was really working, so we wrote our visions for the future on 
paper and sent them around via the postal service. We’d mail each 
research group one printout and they’d have to photocopy more themselves. 

The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although 
the latter quickly became the most common. 

Less important than the content of those first documents was that they 
were available free of charge and anyone could write one. 

Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we 
called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to 
propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design 
became a standard.

After all, everyone understood there was a practical value in choosing to 
do the same task in the same way. For example, if we wanted to move a 
file from one machine to another, and if you were to design the process 
one way, and I was to design it another, then anyone who wanted to talk 
to both of us would have to employ two distinct ways of doing the same 
thing. So there was plenty of natural pressure to avoid such hassles. 

It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other 
restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, 
it was much easier to reach agreement.

This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of 
open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve 
as spectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web 
without it. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information 
in a way that people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply 
built and tested their ideas. 

Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have to 
ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the 
Internet. Others soon copied them — hundreds of thousands of computer 
users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and 
technology. That’s the Web.

Put another way, we always tried to design each new protocol to be both 
useful in its own right and a building block available to others. We did 
not think of protocols as finished products, and we deliberately exposed 
the internal architecture to make it easy for others to gain a foothold. 
This was the antithesis of the attitude of the old telephone networks, 
which actively discouraged any additions or uses they had not sanctioned.

Of course, the process for both publishing ideas and for choosing 
standards eventually became more formal. Our loose, unnamed meetings grew 
larger and semi-organized into what we called the Network Working Group. 

In the four decades since, that group evolved and transformed a couple of 
times and is now the Internet Engineering Task Force. It has some 
hierarchy and formality but not much, and it remains free and accessible 
to anyone.

The R.F.C.’s have grown up, too. 

They really aren’t requests for comments anymore because they are 
published only after a lot of vetting. But the culture that was built up 
in the beginning has continued to play a strong role in keeping things 
more open than they might have been. Ideas are accepted and sorted on 
their merits, with as many ideas rejected by peers as are accepted. 


As we rebuild our economy, I do hope we keep in mind the value of 
openness, especially in industries that have rarely had it. Whether it’s 
in health care reform or energy innovation, the largest payoffs will come 
not from what the stimulus package pays for directly, but from the huge 
vistas we open up for others to explore.

I was reminded of the power and vitality of the R.F.C.’s when I made my 
first trip to Bangalore, India, 15 years ago. I was invited to give a 
talk at the Indian Institute of Science, and as part of the visit I was 
introduced to a student who had built a fairly complex software system. 

Impressed, I asked where he had learned to do so much. He simply said, “I 
downloaded the R.F.C.’s and read them.” 

Stephen D. Crocker is the chief executive of a company that develops 
information-sharing technology. A version of this article appeared in 
print on April 7, 2009, on page A29 of the New York edition. 


Cheers,
Stephen