Request For Comments reference guide
RFC 1000
Document | Type |
RFC - Unknown
(August 1987; No errata)
Obsoletes RFC 999
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Authors | |||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | Legacy | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | Legacy state | (None) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 1000 (Unknown) | |
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group J. Reynolds Request for Comments: 1000 J. Postel ISI August 1987 Obsoletes: RFCs 084, 100, 160, 170, 200, 598, 699, 800, 899, 999 THE REQUEST FOR COMMENTS REFERENCE GUIDE STATUS OF THIS MEMO This RFC is a reference guide for the Internet community which summarizes of all the Request for Comments issued between April 1969 and March 1987. This guide also categorizes the RFCs by topic. INTRODUCTION This RFC Reference Guide is intended to provide a historical account by categorizing and summarizing of the Request for Comments numbers 1 through 999 issued between the years 1969-1987. These documents have been crossed referenced to indicate which RFCs are current, obsolete, or revised. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. THE ORIGINS OF RFCS - by Stephen D. Crocker The DDN community now includes hundreds of nodes and thousands of users, but once it was all a gleam in Larry Roberts' eye. While much of the development proceeded according to a grand plan, the design of the protocols and the creation of the RFCs was largely accidental. The procurement of the ARPANET was initiated in the summer of 1968 -- Remember Vietnam, flower children, etc? There had been prior experiments at various ARPA sites to link together computer systems, but this was the first version to explore packet-switching on a grand scale. ("ARPA" didn't become "DARPA" until 1972.) Unlike most of the ARPA/IPTO procurements of the day, this was a competitive procurement. The contract called for four IMPs to be delivered to UCLA, SRI, UCSB and The University of Utah. These sites were running a Sigma 7 with the SEX operating system, an SDS 940 with the Genie operating system, an IBM 360/75 with OS/MVT (or perhaps OS/MFT), and a DEC PDP-10 with the Tenex operating system. Options existed for additional nodes if the first experiments were successful. BBN won the procurement in December 1968, but that gets ahead of this story. Part of the reason for selecting these four sites was these were existing ARPA computer science research contractors. The precise usage of the ARPANET was not spelled out in advance, and the research community could be counted on to take some initiative. To stimulate this process, a meeting was called during the summer with representatives from the selected sites, chaired by Elmer Shapiro Reynolds & Postel [Page 1] RFC 1000 - Request for Comments Reference Guide August 1987 from SRI. If memory serves me correctly, Jeff Rulifson came from SRI, Ron Stoughton from UCSB, Steve Carr from Utah and I came from UCLA. (Apologies to anyone I've left out; records are inaccessible or lost at this point.) At this point we knew only that the network was coming, but the precise details weren't known. That first meeting was seminal. We had lots of questions -- how IMPs and hosts would be connected, what hosts would say to each other, and what applications would be supported. No one had any answers, but the prospects seemed exciting. We found ourselves imagining all kinds of possibilities -- interactive graphics, cooperating processes, automatic data base query, electronic mail -- but no one knew where to begin. We weren't sure whether there was really room to think hard about these problems; surely someone from the east would be along by and by to bring the word. But we did come to one conclusion: We ought to meet again. Over the next several months, we managed to parlay that idea into a series of exchange meetings at each of our sites, thereby setting the most important precedent in protocol design. The first few meetings were quite tenuous. We had no official charter. Most of us were graduate students and we expected that a professional crew would show up eventually to take over the problems we were dealing with. Without clear definition of what the host-IMP interface would look like, or even what functions the IMP would provide, we focused on exotic ideas. We envisioned the possibility of application specific protocols, with code downloaded to user sites, and we took a crack at designing a language to support this. The first version was known as DEL, for "Decode-Encode Language" and a later version was called NIL, for "Network Interchange Language." When the IMP contract was finally let and BBN provided some definite information on the host-IMP interface, all attention shifted to low-level matters and the ambitious ideas for automatic downloading of code evaporated. It was several years before ideas like remote procedure calls and typed objects reappeared.Show full document text