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

[Jack Haverty]

Thanks, Geoff, interesting article...

While the RFC has been enduring, I've always wondered -- where are all
the Comments in response to those thousands of RFCs that Requested them?  

Is there some "form" site somewhere where each RFC appears when
published and has a "Comments" section to collect and preserve the
Comments.   That kind of thing is pervasive today on all sorts of news
sites, blogs, etc.   But IMHO the RFCs have somehow always been ignoring
the Cs they Request.

I recall writing only several RFCs, but comments typically came back via
email discussions.   Sometimes for years.  I fear most of that aspect of
Internet History, the comments and discussions, has been lost.   I
wonder if the long-standing "technology" of RFCs needs a Version 2,
which captures and preserves the Comments just as it has done for
decades with the Requests.

I guess I should write an RFC about that........

/Jack

On 8/7/20 2:52 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history
wrote:
> *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
>