[ih] History from 1960s to 2025

Thu Dec 25 12:19:42 PST 2025

Hey Matt:

Your note brought up a flood of memories about creating the Internet-Draft
series.  I don't think I've seen a history of the series and its creation,
so I thought I'd dump my memories -- combined with some fact checking in
IETF reports.

Very quickly in the IETF's development, it became clear that it was
generating a large number of *interim* technical documents.  E.g. before
each IETF meeting, a WG would typically produce a "latest draft" of
whatever specification(s) it was working on, so they could be discussed.
People wanted those drafts in a central spot, rather than just mailed to a
WG, so they could figure out which WG meetings were the highest priority to
attend during the IETF week.  Also, some documents were becoming big (100s
of pages), an issue in a time of small disks which limited the size of
emails.  So, it became clear a document series/repository/something else
was needed.

As I recall, the initial ideas bounced around were to use the RFC series or
revive IENs (Internet Engineering Notes so a logical series for the
Internet Enginering Task Force).  Both were swiftly shot down.  Jon Postel
and Joyce Reynolds did not want to place a flood of often partial-drafts of
technical specs into the RFC series, nor deal with the tight timeframes
(e.g. dozens of specs that all had to be published showing up a week before
IETF meetings). For whatever reason, IENs were also declared off limits.

So Phill Gross, as chair of IETF, created a document series called IDEAS
(announced at IETF 8 in NCAR in late 1987).  This produced pushback [my
recollection here].  People wanted the IETF drafts to be ephemeral (fear
that people would start claiming conformance to IDEA ### rather than RFCs,
etc) and various other issues (which I only recall vaguely -- one issue, I
believe, was the IAB was concerned this had the potential to end-run RFCs
[see Note]).  As I recall, intellectual property issues were barely touched
on. People realized things were being invented in WG meetings, but
documenting them for posterity was not yet uppermost in folks' thoughts --
thus the notion IETF documents could be ephemeral and would expire.

As late as IETF 11 (Ann Arbor, late 1988), there was still no document
series in place -- IDEAS were sorta there (about a dozen ever existed), but
not quite.  I note that Karen Bowers, a no nonsense, ex-military (?) person
was brought in to manage many aspects of IETF including its documents
around the time of IETF 11.  The fact that a year had passed and there was
still no solution tells you the level of background discussions about how
to create the needed document series.  Indeed, the cover note in IETF 11
says, essentially, if you want to figure out where a WG is on its drafting
of spec, contact Karen (!?!?!).  Remembering Karen's attitude on ad-hoc
processes, I suspect she put some pressure on Phill and others to find a
better answer ASAP.

Then at IETF 12 (January 1989) the Internet-Drafts series was announced.
It has many of the elements of today's series; standard names, expiration
after 6 months, draft plastered all over the document, in a form that can
easily become an RFC.

Craig

Note re: RFCs.  It is worth remembering that just as IETF was spinning up
(and the workload was quite big -- IETF 11's proceedings lists 10 active
specs for things like Host Requirements, the first MIB, PPP, OSPF and an
EGP successor) the RFC series was sputtering.  It produced about 25 RFCs in
1986 and a similar number in 1987.  It was clear the IETF was going to more
than double that annual total -- in other words, IETF product would soon
dominate the RFC series. The IAB (and Jon P) wanted to retain control of
RFCs and protocols deemed part of the Internet architecture.  This created
a potential dilemma - if the IETF created its own document series, so RFCs
only saw final versions of specifications, that met Jon's need to not
publish ephemeral stuff, but raised the possibility that the IETF could
weaponize its document series to undermine RFCs if specs did not mature to
RFC status after IETF felt they were ready.

On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 9:58 AM Matt Mathis via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> One key development (that predates me, so I can't provide details) was the
> codification (and evolution) of the Internet Draft and RFC processes.    I
> believe that finding the right balance between ease of contribution,
> permanence and implied or explicit (non)authority, embodied by the use of
> the name "Request For Comments" was as important as any individual
> technical detail.   The publication process substantially inspired the
> culture of the IETF (or perhaps vice-versa), which is what enabled
> collaborative engineering between nominally competing organizations.
>
> As far as I know RFCs were the first ever self published archival series of
> documents.
>
> Thanks,
> --MM--
> Evil is defined by mortals who think they know "The Truth" and use force to
> apply it to others.
> -------------------------------------------
> Matt Mathis  (Email is best)
> Home & mobile: 412-654-7529 please leave a message if you must call.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 6:09 PM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > On 12/18/25 12:21 PM, John Day via Internet-history wrote:
> > > And some of us thought, it was the continuation of building a
> > resource-sharing network.  ;-)
> >
> > In the mid 1980's I spent a year or more at the Livermore Labs working
> > on the MFE (magnetic confinement fusion energy) project. (Playing tennis
> > with a multi-million degree ball of plasma as the ball was kinda fun.)
> >
> > I wasn't involved in the networking part but I certainly overheard a lot
> > of expressed desire to share not only our simulations and measurements
> > (we had a couple of seriously-gigantic fusion vessels across the road
> > from my office) as well as our boatload of Cray machines and data
> > libraries.
> >
> > The folks at the labs were pretty good a jury rigging things and it is
> > my understanding that they created some duct-tape-and-bailing-wire
> > systems to do that kind of sharing.
> >
> > Also, in the 1970's when I was at SDC I heard many tales about the Q7
> > and Q32 computers, and the desire to time share the latter among
> > research institutions.  But I have no real memory of what was said in
> > those tales.
> >
> >      --karl--
> >
> >
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