The First RFC
In 1969, a handful of students and researchers tackled a project that would change the world: ARPANET. This initiative by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency aimed to connect four universities on the West Coast: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. Each site had different machines, with their own systems and technical peculiarities. This diversity, which might seem an asset, proved to be more of a headache.
Steve Crocker, a student at UCLA, struggled to sleep one night in April. Technical discussions between teams were piling up, but nothing was being documented anywhere. How could these vastly different machines communicate, and how could the solutions found be documented? In the darkness of his room, he picked up a sheet of paper and began drafting what would become RFC 1, simply titled “Host Software”.
This document was born within the Network Working Group, an informal collective of young researchers who met physically to discuss the very network they were building to avoid travel. The irony of the situation escaped no one. These meetings took place without any particular hierarchy, without official mandate, in a relaxed atmosphere that contrasted sharply with the usual administrative burdens.
Crocker deliberately chose the term “Request for Comments” rather than a more authoritative formulation. He feared that too academic a tone might offend more experienced experts who were perhaps, he imagined, working on the same questions from their offices on the East Coast. This initial caution shaped the spirit of RFCs: documenting without imposing, proposing without constraining.
On April 7, 1969, this first RFC addressed questions about message structuring between computers that seem rudimentary today. Crocker proposed 16-bit headers with destination addresses of only 5 bits, which limited the network to 32 machines. He discussed links, those fixed connections between machines, far removed from today’s dynamic connections. The network latency, estimated at one second, seems enormous compared to today’s microseconds.
A visionary proposal emerged from this document: DEL, or Decode-Encode Language, a terminal description language intended to enable communication between heterogeneous systems. This idea gave rise to the communication standards that would later structure the internet.
The publication of this RFC established new principles. First, complete free access: the documents could be consulted by anyone without paying a cent. Second, openness: anyone could write an RFC, whether a tenured professor or a simple student. These democratic rules challenged academic and industrial conventions. Distribution was initially by postal mail, before evolving to FTP and then email. The first RFCs were sometimes handwritten or typewritten, witnesses to an era when computing was finding its way. Some documents still bear the marks of pen corrections, touching remnants of this artisanal period.
Jon Postel became the first official RFC editor in 1971. Under his benevolent authority, the process became more structured without becoming rigid. The documents gained uniformity while preserving their original spontaneity. He established quality criteria that raised the overall standard without discouraging contributions. Fifty years later, over 8,500 RFCs have been published. They cover all aspects of the internet, from fundamental protocols to the most sophisticated applications. This collection constitutes the technical memory of the internet, a documentary heritage unique in its scope and coherence.
The RFCs prove that it is possible to maintain rigorous standards within an open and collaborative framework. This adventure also reminds us that the foundations of the internet were laid by young people driven by the desire to share rather than to dominate.