[ih] Today’s Internet Still Relies on an ARPANET-Era Protocol: The Request for Comments (Steve Crocker)

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

*The RFC may be the ARPANET’s most enduring legacy*
EXCERPT:

Each March, July, and November, we are reminded that the Internet is not
quite the mature, stable technology that it seems to be. We rely on the
Internet as an essential tool for our economic, social, educational, and
political lives. But when the Internet Engineering Task Force
<https://ietf.org/> meets every four months at an open conference that
bounces from continent to continent, more than 1,000 people from around the
world gather with change on their minds. Their vision of the global network
that all humanity shares is dynamic, evolving, and continuously improving.
Their efforts combine with the contributions of myriad others to ensure
that the Internet always works but is never done, never complete.

The rapid yet orderly evolution of the Internet is all the more remarkable
considering the highly unusual way it happens: without a company, a
government, or a board of directors in charge. Nothing about digital
communications technology suggests that it should be self-organizing or,
for that matter, fundamentally reliable. We enjoy an Internet that is both
of those at once because multiple generations of network developers have
embraced a principle and a process that have been quite rare in the history
of technology. The principle is that the protocols that govern how
Internet-connected devices communicate should be open, expandable, and
robust. And the process that invents and refines those protocols demands
collaboration and a large degree of consensus among all who care to
participate.

As someone who was part of the small team that very deliberately adopted a
collaborative, consensus-based process to develop protocols for the ARPANET
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET>—predecessor to the Internet—I have
been pleasantly surprised by how those ideas have persisted and succeeded,
even as the physical network has evolved from 50-kilobit-per-second
telephone lines in the mid-1960s to the fiber-optic, 5G, and satellite
links we enjoy today. Though our team certainly never envisioned
unforgeable “privacy passes
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-privacy-pass/>” or unique identifiers
for Internet-connected drones
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/drip/about/>—two proposed protocols
discussed at the task force meeting this past March—we did circulate our
ideas for the ARPANET as technical memos among a far-flung group of
computer scientists, collecting feedback and settling on solutions in much
the same way as today, albeit at a much smaller scale.

We called each of those early memos a “Request for Comments” or RFC.
Whatever networked device you use today, it almost certainly follows rules
laid down in ARPANET RFCs written decades ago, probably including protocols
for sending plain ASCII text (RFC 20
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc20.html>, issued in 1969), audio or video
data streams (RFC 768 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc768.html>, 1980), and
Post Office Protocol, or POP, email (RFC 918
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc918.html>, 1984).

*Anatomy of an RFC*...

[...]
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/todays-internet-still-relies-on-an-arpanetera-protocol-the-request-for-comments

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True