[ih] Fwd: History from 1960s to 2025

Thu Dec 25 16:45:26 PST 2025


> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: [ih] History from 1960s to 2025
> Date: December 25, 2025 at 19:44:08 EST
> To: Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net>
> 
> It always seemed peculiar that a Request for *Comment* was a standard
> and 
> an Internet-Draft which sounds like a draft standard was a Comment.
> 
> And early on RFCs were Requests for Comments.
> 
>> On Dec 25, 2025, at 15:19, Craig Partridge via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 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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>> 
>> 
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