Happy 35th birthday, RFC 1!

An anonymous reader writes "On April 7th, 1969, the first ever RFC was published, describing the networking technology behind the then-nascent ARPAnet. In the intervening 35 years, networking technology has come a long way, but it brings perspective to the modern Internet to reflect on how it all began."

Comments

First RFC !

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I surely failed but it's funny :)

Re:First RFC !

[lcsjk]

We were using RFC's long before that. But then Request-For-Change was how all this internet stuff got started anyway!

Re:First RFC !

[xYoni69x]

"Yeah yeah yeah... Will you give me my fucking change, please? I'm triple-parked!"
-George Carlin

Re:First RFC !

[j-pimp]

But then Request-For-Change was how all this internet stuff got started anyway! Auctually its request for comments!!!

Re:First RFC !

[lcsjk]

Auctually, you are right. I was making a joke. RFC was and is the common term used throughout industry for change requests (along with ECN and ECR) long before the internet got started. RFC is for those outside the engineering dept.-generally.

Strange

[ThatTallGuy]

I'd have thought the first RFC would have been defining the structure of RFC's. :)

Re:Strange

[re-Verse]

Redundant - parents post isn't redundant. I'd score it at least a +4 (a mix of funny and insightful). I mean, it makes total sense. You'd expect the first RFC to quite clearly lay out a concept of how an RFC will work.

I'm probably burning karma with this post but i think its completely unfair that that post got knocked down.

Re:Strange

[Frymaster]

I'm probably burning karma with this post but i think its completely unfair that that post got knocked down.

i think you're confusing the subject of this story with the lesser-known RFK.

request for karma

Re:Strange

[ezzzD55J]

Using itself? how could it ever be written then? The structure of RFC's has to be defined out-of-band, if you ask me.

Re:Strange

[Anonymous Coward]

there are RFCs out there that define things like the structure of RFCs, language concerns (ie, precise definitions of "shall" vs "will", "must", etc), grammatical items, and other things that go into preparing documents such as these. unfortunately, I dont have the time to look it up the exact RFC#, so I'll leave that to someone else.

Re:Strange

[cethiesus]

RFC2223 - Instructions to RFC Authors

RFC 0825 - Request for comments on Requests For Comments

Re:Strange

[Anonymous Coward]

borked link. lets try that again, shall we?

RFC 0825 - Request for comments on Requests For Comments

Re:Strange

[GrouchoMarx]

i think you're confusing the subject of this story with the lesser-known RFK.

Now what does the late President's late brother have to do with anything? He didn't invent the Internet, did he?

(Robert F. Kennedy, for those who don't know their American history...)

Re:Strange

[Anonymous Coward]

> You'd expect the first RFC to quite clearly lay out a concept of how an RFC will work.

Hm, I agree, maybe that's it ought to be. But more often than not, you just give it a try and thus shape the concept.

The fact that the concept is still alive shows its quality and that the underlying idea was good.

Re:Strange

[lfourrier]

no, it was nb 3, 2 days later

0003 Documentation conventions. S.D. Crocker. Apr-09-1969. (Format:
TXT=2323 bytes) (Obsoleted by RFC0010) (Status: UNKNOWN)

Too late

[jolyonr]

Is it too late to raise comments now?

Re:Too late

[ackthpt]

Is it too late to raise comments now?

It's never too late, but your comments may not draw much serious attention.

I'm curious which model of Teletype they were using, back in 1969. My father still has a few Model 14 and I first used 33's on a visit to a corporate sponsor of my Explorer Post. I always did like the font from the Model 43, I used to run off most of my library copies of code on them for the easy to read font.

Ah the smell of printer ribbon ink in the spring...

I have a very important question.

[DrEldarion]

Do we get cake?

Re:I have a very important question.

[daeley]

Nina: "Now DrEldarion, don't be greedy, let's pass it along and make sure everyone gets a piece."

Re:I have a very important question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that what RFC means - Request for Cake? MMM RFC.

Re:I have a very important question.

[DrEldarion]

The ratio of people to cake is too big...

Re:I have a very important question.

[Anonymous Coward]

:cb:

Re:I have a very important question.

[rbolkey]

"Sorry, we're all out of cake."

How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[ackthpt]

It was 19 when I finally got a dialup connection to a server with a shell account. I know my life could have been spent more wisely...had I only been connected sooner.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[AyeRoxor!]

I was 17 in 1995 when I got my first dialup shell. It was also my first introduction to unix, FTP, chmod, and hosting a website. I had been on BBS's since I was 14, which was in 1992. I had first used a modem when I was about 10. My parents got me my first computer, an IBM PCjr, when I was 8.

Goodbye, time. It flees.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[silas_moeckel]

Internet was at age 10 (dialup to a local Uni) but there wasent much there (1985) the BBS's were where it was at for that time along with things like FidoNet.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[SoTuA]

I was sixteen, I was two years from graduating high school and my brother let me use his University account. I logged in with our 386 laptop with the internal 2600 baud modem, and used it to ftp to some university or the other to harvest album lyrics and guitar tabs (the old olga archive, methinks)

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[stephenisu]

2400 baud you mean? 9600? :)

ah, the good ol' days...

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[Anonymous Coward]

And now at 20, you found the right term settings that enable you to view ascii porn.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[SoTuA]

2400... seems like I got it mixed up with the atari 2600 :D

This crop of young 'uns that don't remember the text-only internet!

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[ackthpt]

And now at 20, you found the right term settings that enable you to view ascii porn.

I did find that 1200 baud was the right speed for watching Godzilla vs. Bambi on a VT52.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[SocietyoftheFist]

I was 21 in 1991 and had an account on AT&T 3B2 running SYS V connected to the internet.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[Alioth]

I was 18. Actually, I was already running a FidoNet BBS by then.

I also rooted the Unix box at work (an IBM 6150 RT running AIX 3.something) due to a really trivial root password (it wasn't a computer job, but in the idle moments, I started learning Unix on that machine. Mainly by trying to see what each command did. Whilst logged in as root! It was great fun when I discovered 'wall'. Good job I didn't experimentally try rm -rf * :-) Things got much safer when I discovered the 'man' command)

Ah, the days before the web.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[jav1231]

I'm with ya. RFC 1 was about 18 or so in 1987. Around that time I logged onto my first BBS. It was a couple of years later before the such BBS's started using FidoNet extensively. I remember thinking "Cool! I can send an email to the west coast and have a reply by morning!" Now users complain when they're not there immediately!
User: "Yeah, I was on the phone with my vendor and sent them a critical document. I stayed on the phone and they didn't receive it. We waited several minutes and nothing! Is the Internet down or something?"
Me: "Yes."

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[Anonymous Coward]

ahh, the good old days... i would have been 15.

"listen here, sonny, when i was a kid, we downloaded .jpegs from nasa over 1200 baud... 3 hours to download an image, but we were glad for that image..." ;-)

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

I guess I was 14 or 15 when I got my first modem. A shiny 2400bps modem I got cheaply. With it I could try out those mysterieus BBS's.

I believe it was when I got 16 that Compuserve started with mailing those CD's with a free day of internet access. I got a few (dozen) of those and so managed to get several weeks of free internet access @ 14k400bps.
Later I got a free month of internet access through Planet internet and after that month I got my first real account @ 56Kbps.
And about 2 years ago I switched to cable.

Sheesh. It's been nearly a decade since I started getting too involved with computers.
I guess I missed out on quite a lot of things in real life. Lost my first serieus gf because of this. Didn't learned those essential social skills. And it's damn hard to catch up on these things.
But OTOH without the internet I wouldn't have know there are that many ways to be kinky.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[SCHecklerX]

Hrm..I guess I'd date that to when I discovered usenet in 1992 (on PSUVM). Before that the only online that I knew was BBS's. TCP/IP? On my Modem? NEAT! (back when I did my first SLIP line on OS/2 back into PSU...I guess that was around 1993/1994)

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[Short Circuit]

I was six...it was 1989.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[akajerry]

I was 18 when I first given the key(board) to an HP Bobcat (68020 based UNIX workstation) called mit-hamlet. That was pre-DNS, so to access a host you either needed to know its IP address or have it listed in your local hosts files. Some people used to collect host files, merge them together and then put the "master" host file on an FTP site for other to download. Thus the convention of pre-pending your site to the hostname to avoid name conflicts.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[Punk Walrus]

I was 21, at the Bessel machine at the University of Maryland, when I got my shell account. It was a Sun System V, I think, and I had a version of csh. My job was to check for core dumps, and do network testing for the admin. Real basic stuff. I browsed ftp and gopherspace with ARCHIE and VERONICA. Anyone remember WAIS? Panda?

Before that, BBSs. Mostly WWIV, Nightline, and a few other types of software. I helped set up a Fidonet once, which had a crossover into the 'Net, and another time, was a tech guy for Caffnet, a POD-like network a friend of mine set up.

Heh... good times.

More on topic, my favorite RFC's:

Etymology of "Foo"
The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)
Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
And who can forget A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
? Packet by pigeon...

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[stephenisu]

Gotcha, my first was a 9600 fax 2400 data modem. God it pissed me off. It was almost as fast to fax me a BBS page as it was to have me log in and watch the ASCII art download one line at a time.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[dbIII]

I was 19 when I finally got a dialup connection to a server with a shell account. I know my life could have been spent more wisely...had I only been connected sooner.

Age 23 - Usenet - alt.rec.brewing? - beer brewing recipies, then a dial up account and an msdos gopher client two years later when the access prices came down.

Re:How old was it when YOU first got on the net?

[Mark of THE CITY]

Around 27, in 1987 or so, working for the Navy; mostly for email, but I learned about Usenet then.

April 7th, 1969

[pen]

April 7th, 1969... Isn't that before the beginning of time()?

Re:April 7th, 1969

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems odd to me that Un*x time starts 1/1/70, but the opperating system was in development before that date. Which raises the question, what did they use for a base before 1970?

Re:April 7th, 1969

[grub]

what did they use for a base before 1970?

A black and white camera looking at a sundial in the Berkeley campus.

Re:April 7th, 1969

[neodymium]

isn't that why some older OS treat time() as signed int ?

Re:April 7th, 1969

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Berkeley? I would think they would pick someplace closer to home. Wasn't Bell Labs in Jersey? And Unix didn't become Unix until 1969 anyway.

Re:April 7th, 1969

[mustangsal66]

Hmm...

RFC 1 - 8 months BE (Before Epoch)

Interesting

Re:April 7th, 1969

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, some "older" OSes such as every Unix system and probably almost every other OS in use currently. Well, to be fair, I guess some OSes do use signed long or God forbid even signed long long. Using an unsigned integer type would violate POSIX, though, and more importantly make time_ts almost completely useless. And using floating point types, although cool, would just be weird.

Re:April 7th, 1969

[belloc]

Which raises the question, what did they use for a base before 1970?

Well, back then, all their base weren't belong to...^H^H^H^H

Well, there were no bases to belong to...us...back^H^H^H^H

In the '60s, all their bases were belong to them...^H^H^H^H

Oh, forget it. I'll never be 'Slashdot funny'.

Belloc

Re:April 7th, 1969

[SCHecklerX]

Heh..this type of thing is actually pretty true. I remember when we first got cable tv (little redneck town at the top of a mountain). The 'information channel' (you know, the one that now uses windoze, likely used amiga in the past to show communitity bulletins and weather and such) was a camera inside of a cylinder. Within the cylinder, they had mounted a thermometer, barometer, and community notices in large type on paper. The camera would slowly revolve to show everything. Didn't really seem weird back then, but kind of funny now in retrospect (seeing as computers WERE around back then and I believe they were being used for those channels...guess they were still to expensive or the local cable co was just not that informed).

Re:April 7th, 1969

[nutznboltz]

Read The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System by Dennis M. Ritchie. Not that the answer is there but it's a good read.

An answer to your question can be found in the TUHS archive. Once inside an archive mirror look for the Readme in the directory PDP-11/Distributions/research/1972_stuff for this quote

In the early version of UNIX, timestamps were in 1/60th second units. A 32-bit counter using these units overflows in 2.5 years, so the epoch had to be changed periodically, and I believe 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1973 were all epochs at one stage or another.

Re:April 7th, 1969

[jonadab]

> 1969... Isn't that before the beginning of time()?

I think Tenex handles (handled?) time differently from Unix.

It is interesting to note the historical reasons why Tenex/Twenex died and
Unix pretty much completely took over; mostly it boils down to portability;
Unix was written in C which, despite its many flaws, was not particular to
a specific hardware, but Twenex was married to the 36-bit assembly language
and stuck on a doomed hardware architecture, never to be ported. Otherwise
things might have gone rather differently.

Which technology do you mean exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're talking about the hardware, then the first networks were the telegraph networks followed by the telephone networks. The thing is, the telephone networks that still carry the majority of Internet traffic haven't changed since Alexander Graham Bell. In fact, if he were reanimated and shown a wall jack he'd recognize it and the telephone connected to it. Neither have changed much since he invented them. If you're talking about protocols and computer networking then I guess we've come along way since 1969. I suppose.

Re:Which technology do you mean exactly?

[tverbeek]

I thought that phones were not modular (able to be plugged in and out) until recently. I read that the phones were hard wired until the last 30 years or so. True/Not True?

I'm no expert on this, but I believe the modern RJ11 wall jack came into widespread use in the U.S. in the 1960's or 70's. (I remember seeing them for the first time as a kid.) Before that the standard removable connector was a largish plug with four round prongs in a trapezoidal arrangement (so it could only go on one way). In Bell's day, a typical phone would have been hard-wired, and certainly didn't look like any modern phone (with the possible exception of a wall-mounted pay phone).

Re:Which technology do you mean exactly?

[gemtech]

there were still using the 4 prong guy into the 70's. I have a house built in 1973 with a couple of them still. but now a bunch of RJ11s, 100baseT wires and jacks, 802.11b through the air, 6 cable tv runs...

Hrmmm...

[SeaDour]

Somehow, I get the feeling Al Gore will not be invited to its birthday party.

Re:Hrmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

If this post were about George Bush it would be Score:5,Funny

Re:Hrmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

That that post were funny it would be Score:5,Funny

Re:Hrmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

And thats that with that

Wow, creation story of the internet

[ResQuad]

Reading that RFC is like reading the creation story of the internet, you can see where some of the things they come up with wayyyyy back then, have moved now. Normally I am not much for reading RFC's, but thats really intresting, if for nothing else to see how far we have gone in just 35 years.

Re:Wow, creation story of the internet

[Jugalator]

Indeed :-)

How about this one:
RFC 799 - Internet name domains (September 1981)

"In the long run, it will not be practicable for every internet
host to include all internet hosts in its name-address tables."

:-)

Re:Wow, creation story of the internet

[4of12]

An important one.

IMHO, probably one of the most important and most well-known is RFC 822.

Even though HTTP is used even more than SMTP these days it wasn't always so. I kept hearing no end of RFC 822, the Dcc field, etc. in the old days.

From a history of the Internet perspective I have to wonder when it was that port 80 traffic overtook port 25.

Re:Wow, creation story of the internet

[S.Lemmon]

Thanks to the voluminous efforts of your kindly Internet spammers, are you really sure it has? :-)

Re:Wow, creation story of the internet

[$javamaniac]

RFCs are for people who make things. You know, the nerdy people you mock but without whose efforts the cool people would still be living in trees and caves.

The net these days has been fouled by thieves like telecommunication companies and spammers, both of which commit theft of resource without making any real contribution.

Since the defining characteristic of humans is the making of things, it follows that those who do not make things are not human. Therefore, it is ethically acceptable to exterminate them as vermin provided they do not suffer unduly. Given the trouble they've caused, their due suffering gives us quite a bit of latitude.

Re:Wow, creation story of the internet

[jonadab]

> From a history of the Internet perspective I have to wonder when it was
> that port 80 traffic overtook port 25.

Sometime in the mid-to-late nineties I think. But only because web pages
consume more bytes than email messages for the same amount of time spent
reading them. Images are the main factor here. Most email is still sent
as text/plain, and most email that's sent as richtext or html doesn't
include any actual non-text content, apart from a little markup.

What's more interesting is to note when web fora became more popular than
usenet. I think this traces to a combination of three factors: increasing
amounts of usenet spam, improving quality of web browsers (just _try_ to
spend an hour on slashdot using Netscape 4 or IE 4; it's painful), and the
decreasing average quality of mail and usenet clients (due mainly to the
introduction of a lot of low-quality ones; the better ones have actually
continued to improve, but finding them among the dross is harder). It's
astonishing how many people settle for e.g. Outlook -- or even webmail.

usenet is still a really cool resource, though.

Yet Another Dup... Come on, Slashdot

[ReadParse]

This was posted 5 years ago. It has a birthday every year, folks :)

RP

Re:Yet Another Dup... Come on, Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

But, people have gotten a better sense of humor since then (look to the scores 5 years ago)...

And I'm still using it

[Anonymous Coward]

I see no reason to upgrade to RFC 2, just useless bloat I say. RFC1's worked great for 35 years, and it'll work great for another 35.

Happy bday!

[Allowee]

Happy 35th birthday, RFC 1!!!!!

should I also post my birthday on slashdot ?
thats going to be fun if everybody posted birthday...

Re:Happy bday!

[ash*embers]

Wasn't even a fetus by then. Just a mere RFC between my 'rents.

Re:Happy bday!

[Anonymous Coward]

Request for Contraception?

Re:Happy bday!

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Yes, but you should know that the rule on posting birthdays on /. is that you have to buy every one of us a (few) beer(s), and in exchange we will sing "happy birthday to you".

Re:Happy bday!

[Anonymous Coward]

...in exchange we will sing "happy birthday to you".

Just don't tell the RIAA, we don't want to pay royalties.

If Steve Crocker had been a *real* programmer...

[kclittle]

... he'd have called it RFC 0! :-)

I see a movie in this

[Anonymous Coward]

A simple RFC fights in Vietnam, lives through the turbulent sixties, experiences the wide lapels and platforms of the drugged out seventies, and ends up a washed up April fool's pigeon joke.

...and IBM/360 is 40 today

[Jayfar]

It's in the book. You could look it up (or google).

And some great RFCs followed...

[piquadratCH]

This one is my favourite:

RFC 1149: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

Re:And some great RFCs followed...

[perdu]

But how would this be implemented?

"An additional property is built-in worm detection and eradication"

Re:And some great RFCs followed...

[Mycroft_VIII]

IIRC they used a printer to print out the datagrams on one end and a sanner with ocr software to reconstruct them on the other. bandwith was a bit low and latency even worse.
Thats right some nuts actually did implement it.
I'm pretty shure slashdot ran an article on it at one point, and you could probably find it through google.

Mycroft

'Lincoln Wand' = stylus?

[wodelltech]

The RFC includes an itneresting statment about 'user input from keyboard, Lincoln Wand, etc.'. It appears that a Lincoln Wand is what we now call a stylus...

http://www.packet.cc/files/lincoln-wand.html

Re:'Lincoln Wand' = stylus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to Mrs. Lincoln.

Re:'Lincoln Wand' = stylus?

[freshmkr]

The RFC includes an itneresting statment about 'user input from keyboard, Lincoln Wand, etc.'. It appears that a Lincoln Wand is what we now call a stylus.

I had never heard of it before either, but if you read more carefully, it appears that the Lincoln Wand is more like a 3D mouse. It's basically an ultrasonic microphone that picks up signals from four ultrasound transmitters--the delay caused by the speed of sound is used to determine the wand's location in space. A quote:

An ultrasonic position-sensing device has been designed which will allow a computer to determine periodically the x, y, and z coordinates of the tip of a pensized wand.

--Tom

Re:'Lincoln Wand' = stylus?

[este]

An ultrasonic position-sensing device has been designed which will allow a computer to determine periodically the x, y, and z coordinates of the tip of a pensized wand.

Am I the only one who misread this as being a penis-sized wand? Now -that- would make for an interesting input device.....though probably most effective for navigating through pr0n.

Re:'Lincoln Wand' = stylus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who misread this as being a penis-sized wand?

Yes.

RTF[AM]

[Plutor]

> Which technology do you mean exactly?

RTFA (or RTFM). It's an RFC for the IMP networking protocol. It looks like layers 2-4 all in one!

More on RFCs

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know what an RFC is, then here is what you need to know.

Question from the ignorant.

[jellomizer]

Um I figured out RFC stands for Request For Comments. But what actually is it in the short version. I Never ran across this term before. But I would like to be enlighten.

Re:Question from the ignorant.

[WWWWolf]

RFCs are basically Internet standard drafts that are circulated in hopes of, uh, receiving comments. They describe how the various things in the Internet are supposed to work, covering almost everything from low-level standards (packet structures and such) to high-level protocols (such as HTTP, SMTP and so on).

They're generally of the quality of becoming de-facto standards in themselves without ever getting officially turned into actual standards anywhere. They're what everyone refers to, anyway. =)

Re:Question from the ignorant.

[swschrad]

The Connected Internet was operated by committee of the users. engineering details were worked out through the mechanism of issuance of RFCs (request for comment) and comments thereto for the filer and /or committee. the IETF (internet engineering task force) was the body that governed the RFC process, and it just sorta grew out of some chats by the detail wizards working on the Arpanet at the time.

what we have now is not necessarily The Connected Internet as it was known and loved in the 80s and early 90s. but it should remain as such, controlled by the users, not a bunch of pinheaded goddamned government know-nothings pushing alternate agendas.

Re:Question from the ignorant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Request for c0ck

Re:Question from the ignorant.

[globalar]

You can tell that open collaboration and communication are at the heart of the Internet, going back to its design. Look at the titling of core documents - "Request for Comment." Even on /., the nature of an article is requesting for comments and further analysis. Because of this legacy, where humans once networked computers, computers network humans.

This process stands today because it works - not perfectly, but we all benefit from the paradigm. It is our responsibility as members (and some of us professionals) in the Internet community to ensure that the spirit of the RFC never leaves. We should not deny the principles which brought us here - openness, communication, collaboration. Let's not forget the future - open source software, free speech, distributed control, and better S:N.

We would be wise to always request for the comments of our peers. It's gotten us this far.

Re:Question from the ignorant.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're documents that purport to explain how a particular technology works like TCP/IP, but don't give you enough information to implement them from scratch. That's why everyone goes back to the orginal source code.

RFC 1

[phunster]

Will Mel Gibson be making a movie based on RFC 1?

Re:RFC 1

[Thud457]

Actually, he's doing RFC 1-10 all in one movie!

Maybe things would've worked out better if the Big Guy hadn't acted unilaterally and instead implemented a process to incorporate user feedback.

Re:RFC 1

[Lobo_Louie]

Hmm and document the 12 hours prior to RFC1? Goob idea!

Re:RFC 1

[Anonymous Coward]

The Request The For The Comments?

Interesting note at the end

[stox]

"SRI is currently modifying their on-line retrieval system which will be the major software component on the Network Documentation Center so that it can be operated with model 35 teletypes. The control of the teletypes will be written in DEL. All sites will write DEL compilers and use NLS through the DEL program."

It may be hard to imagine, but back then CRT terminals were a rare beast. Most machine interaction was done via Teletype, punch cards, and line printers.

Re:Interesting note at the end

[redwoodtree]

Back then nothing, as late as 1988 I was still working with real estate companies that were using line printers to get real estate reports through BBS connections. Going through a BBS on a line printer is an amazing waste of paper.

It makes me wonder what is a more giant waste, all the electricity monitors use or all the paper that was wated printing out the same menu 10 billion times at every real estate office around the country.

Re:Interesting note at the end

[AndroidCat]

I tell you, the frame rate on games was hell! (As well as being bad for trees.)

Re:Interesting note at the end

[ross.w]

I remember in the Fortran course thatn was part of my Engineering degree we had teletypes. I used to log in to the VDU to write my assignment, then log out and go to the teletype to print it out because it was easier than figuring out how to use the printer.

I was forced to learn when they junked the teletypes.

Re:If Steve Crocker had been a *real* programmer..

[jpetts]

... he'd have called it RFC 0!

But 0! (zero factorial) is equal to 1, so what's your problem?

If you meant RFC0, I'm working on that right now, and it will be published in 1967 as soon as I can get this flux capacitor to work...

More like 14-15 here...

[Kjella]

...but unlike you, I know my life could have been spent more wisely, had I only connected later. All those late nights (couldn't occupy the line on daytime) downloading which I could have done in a tiny fraction of the time now.

Sigh I remember then how downloading images (hell, even .txt files) was sloooow. Ah well, I'm sure those that grow up today will one day envy the young ones growing up with 100Mbit+ Internet connections, lol.

Kjella

Suddenly I dont feel so "old"

[KarmaOverDogma]

Being that I was born on this day in '68.

I guess that explains why I like to be online all the time ^ ^

A bit off-topic, I know, but it's nice to know I'm close to the birth of something nifty :D
.

What If?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you an idea I find intriguing. Think about the internet today, how it exists in all of its different ways. The web, multiplayer games, irc, and so on. We all know what it is like. All the ways we love it, all the ways we hate it. The ways it interacts with and shapes our lives.

Now let us imagine if there was a small change in history, resulting in large changes, that resulted in even larger changes, to the internet! Now imagine if there was no feminist movement of any kind in the 1900s, and that 50% of the American adult population today was housewives that use the internet all day long. OMFGLOLROTFLMFAO!!!!!

Re:What If?

[Anonymous Coward]

No woman's sufferage => no alcoholic prohibition => no (weak) Mafia

You nailed it, bud! Carrie Nation ruined this nation!!! Stupid cunt!

Re:What If?

[Anonymous Coward]

No no you got it all wrong. Forget about everything but the internet in that situation. Suddenly teenage-young-adult males are outnumbered by their mothers on the internet rather than dominating it. It would be so different, so weird.

Re:What If?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Well, at least trolls would be send to bed by their mothers when they do their thing.
Just imagine what a "First Post" thread would look:

- Fris Psot! (by Johny the Troll)
- Johny, I told you a million time not to annoy the nice people on Slashdot. Now go do you're homework!. (by Johny's Mother)
- oh mom, I'll do it after dinner.
- Now listen here young man, you'll do as you're told or do I have to send your father an e-mail?

Re:What If?

[HBPiper]

50% of the American population may not be housewives that use the Internet all day long, but I bet that if a study was done it would be surprising how many of today's housewives are on the internet during the day.

Re:What If?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prohibition happened before women's suffrage.
Prohibition was the 18th Amendment and Universial right to vote was the 19th Amendment....

Re:What If?

[TheCrazyFinn]

However, the Suffrage movement predates Prohibition, and the two were intrinsically tied (Most of the movers and shakers in the Prohibition Movement got their start as suffragettes)

A couple weeks late?

[soh10r]

RFC 4 has a date of 24 March 1969. Granted, it probably wasn't considered an RFC until a couple of weeks later, but...

Sure RFC 1's 35...

[Intocabile]

but he still lives in his parents basement.

Re:Sure RFC 1's 35...

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean Al Gore's basement?

Re:If Steve Crocker had been a *real* programmer..

[Thud457]

Don't forget to write RFC -1, while you're back there : "A algorthim for achieving the elusive first post using a time-travelling Delorean"!

author ?

[mirko]

Who submitted the RFC ? What has he become ?

Re:author ?

[mirko]

RTFA :)

Re:author ?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Al Gore 2) Nothing

Re:author ?

[Brandybuck]

It was Al Gore! Just ask him...

PDF

[vurg]

That RFC is available in PDF format. I didn't know PDF was available back then.

Re:PDF

[j_cavera]

In 1969, it stood for "Petroglyphic Document Format". They were etched on stone tablets with a "Lincoln Stylus" (see document).

Re:PDF

[WWWWolf]

Actually, if I remember correctly, these things didn't even exist as plain text files in the very beginning. They were on paper first, mailed around.

As it says in the end of RFC 1: "This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry into the online RFC archives by Celeste Anderson 3/97"

I hear the Crocker also wrote the first RFC in the bathroom or something. (Got to check that fact. It was in book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late". Somewhere in my bookshelf, can't reach there right now.)

Re:PDF

[Anonymous Coward]

You remember right. The bathroom was the only quiet place in the house.

32 Hosts??

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed that 5 bits are reserved for the destination.

Does that mean they were limited to the astronomical number of 32 hosts on the ARPANet?

-Mark

Re:32 Hosts??

[Lennie]

No this was before the ARPANet. Had to start somewhere. :-)

amazing linked to article

[satsuke]

hey, now if all 'linked from front page of slashdot' posts were like this, no one would care if they got slashdotted.

3 or os images and 5K of text, hell, even my little p200 'what the hell, it can run linux' can handle that.

This isn't really related to the post, but I find it very interesting the fact that in almost all things, the simplest answers are usually correct.

1. Built HTML that is simple enough to be read by lynx and you'll have a very readable, universally accessable, highly portable and translatable site.

2. Built a simple system of relaying packets with some transport validation mechanism (TCP) and it will take over the world.

of course could you imagine if we had to deal with bridged IPX or LAT based networks .. or even netbeui

And then, suddenly, years later...

[ackthpt]

A simple RFC fights in Vietnam, lives through the turbulent sixties, experiences the wide lapels and platforms of the drugged out seventies, and ends up a washed up April fool's pigeon joke.

It is found in declassified documents that Nixon was spying on it and Hoover considered putting a hit on it. That was the long silent gap in the tapes. The answer is finally known.

Keeping ASCII artist employeed since 1969...

[shawnce]

We all have to be happy that the wonderful world of RFCs have kept ASCII artists employed for 35 years and from the looks of it will for generations to come. Congratulation!

[Why use vector line art when ASCII art can look so good? ;-)]

Oh oh...

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

"The ration of people-to-cake is off!"

Now that's a small network

[iamnotaclown]

From the RFC:

The header is 16 bits and contains the following information:

Destination 5 bits
Link 8 bits
Trace 1 bit
Spare 2 bits

The destination is the numerical code for the HOST to which the message should be sent.

5 bits for destination means a maximum of 32 hosts. And I bet they thought that was overkill at the time. :-)

Re:Now that's a small network

[francium de neobie]

Didn't they say 10 computers would be enough for the whole world? ;)

Re:Now that's a small network

[Anonymous Coward]

Destination 5 bits
Link 8 bits
Trace 1 bit
Spare 2 bits

The destination is the numerical code for the HOST to which the message should be sent.
5 bits for destination means a maximum of 32 hosts. And I bet they thought that was overkill at the time. :-)

You need to look and think before posting stuff like this.

Notice the 2 spare bits? The expansion of the Internet is accounted for by a factor of FOUR. We'll all be dead and gone by the time we need more addressing space.

And stop wasting memory storing years in four digits!

Re:Now that's a small network

[einnor]

Didn't they say 10 computers would be enough for the whole world? ;)

Yeah, and we're there. There's this huge multi-processor, redundant, distributed computer. It has a bus that any processor unit can use to communicate with any other. Processor units can vary widely in the specific technology used, but they must communicate (with each other) on the message bus. Most input terminals are tied to a single processor.

The Internet is the world's main computer. And that's the only computer we really need.

Re:Now that's a small network

[B.D.Mills]

Yes that's true - only the person speaking forgot to specify the base for that number.

Don't Read It!

[nightsweat]

I've just patented the RFC process. You owe me a dollar.

Re:Don't Read It!

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

I just patented the dollar. So you own me half of your money. And tomorrow, you'll own me half your money again.
But don't worry, you'll never be out of money. You'll just get infinitly close to broke.

Re:Don't Read It!

[nightsweat]

Curses, foiled again. Wanna race?

Proud

[thebus]

The Colonel would be so proud.

Re:Proud

[thebus]

You know... RFC is finger licking good.

Oh well... I thought it was funny.

Re:Proud

[Call Me Black Cloud]

It was amusing, once you explained it. I didn't get it until you made the RFC-KFC link. Maybe if you put "Sanders" after colonel it would have been more obvious. Nice try, anyway...

RFC authors?

[Doc Ruby]

If I have a protocol I want documented, how do I find a document author who can create an RFC?

Re:RFC authors?

[Anonymous Coward]

ACTUAL SERIOUS REPLY:

You take it to an IETF Working Group. Anyone
can participate, and you don't even need to
physically turn up (although it helps).

see RFC2026 and the Tao of IETF:
http://www.ietf.org/tao.html

-----Nick 'sharkey' Moore.

prefirst

[Doc Ruby]

No, RFC 0 is the meta RFC. Unfortunately, documentation of the 0-based numbering scheme ("see RFC 0"), that has become so popular with computers and their geeks since the 1960s, wasn't submitted to the RFC-editor for years, well after RFC 10. By then, the RFC-editor was forced to reject it, as RFCs document actual implementations, and are merely Requests For Comments from other users of the system, not design documents. The vast preponderance of RFCs had been written (so it seemed - they'd almost completely debugged ARPANet) by RFC 10's era, so it would have been a cruel irony to finish the series merely revising the counting base to recognize the "zeroth" RFC, which indicates that RFCs start at "0".

Re:prefirst

[NuShrike]

RFC 0 probably predates all computers because computer math starts from 0.

Or, RFCs are written in Pascal.

Re:Another anniversary today

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the correct way to post this would be "GET SOME PRIORITIES!!!"

Re:If Steve Crocker had been a *real* programmer..

[DR SoB]

Does that mean that RFC0 + RFC0 = RFC2? If so what does RFC1 + RFC1 = ???

Re:If Steve Crocker had been a *real* programmer..

[red floyd]

Then the text would read:

First RFC!!!!

I wonder if

[Johnny Doughnuts]

Telemarketers were around in '69. Because if they were, they might have thought that the internet, or whatever they called it (I didn't RTF RFC) wouldn't become a haven for such evil things such as spam, and worms.

It just saddens me to see that they could be carefree back then, not worrying about anything... and us having to pay the fucking piper. *sigh*

Re:I wonder if

[CyberLord Seven]

Telemarketers may have existed back then but if so they would have been a SMALL group focused on specialized targets. The reason? Very few credit cards. Also, in the US people were actually sent to JAIL for NOT PAYING their bills. Most advertising was done in television, newspapers, and magazines. That's right, when you went to the movies the only ads you saw were for other movies. With the exception of 2001: a Space Odyssey you didn't see any product placement either. Altogether a very different time. As for your comment about not worrying about anything; have you ever read a history book? Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. had been assasinated just the prior year. Vietnam had gotten WAY OUT OF HAND. Pollution was threatening the lives of people. The HUMAN rights of black people in the US was only just beginning to be recognized. We had plenty to worry about. We also had some nice things to help us through the troubling times. Most notably for me was the fact that I was growing up in Berkeley and I spent half my time on Telegraph avenue around all the hot babes from UC Berzerkely!

ok, so feature me this batman ...

[joab_son_of_zeruiah]

What's the smallest rfc number that's still considered "important".

Re:ok, so feature me this batman ...

[Fedallah]

While "important" is a matter of opinion, it's probably RFC 768, User Datagram Protocol.

Re:ok, so feature me this batman ...

[jonadab]

Generally, anything listed in STD 1 is considered fairly important. The lowest RFC numbers I see there are 768 (UDP), 791 (IP), 792 (ICMP), and 793 (TCP), all of which are quite thoroughly important, fundamental to the internet. 821 and 822 are vital for email. Some of the RFCs not listed in STD 1 do have some importance, however, and it's possible that there's an important low-numbered one I'm missing.

RFC1543

[RAMMS EIN]

Read RFC1543

Re:RFC1543

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks. I'm looking for a way to find *authors*, not just instructions to them. When I find them, the first question I'll ask them is "What is RFC 1543?" They actually need know nothing else, but of course tech experience will differentiate those who do have that necessary writing skill.

Structure definition = lawyers = hassle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Structure definition = lawyers = hassle.
Fortunately there was none in the beginning.

teletype models

[John_Sauter]

We used Model 33's and Model 35's. These used 7-bit ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) rather than the 5-bit Baudot used by the Model 28. The low cost of the Model 33 made ASCII the standard character set for non-IBM computers of the time, and hence for the Internet.

The Model 33 and Model 35 were upper case only; the lower case Model 37 came later.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)

Well, they left out the first COMMENT submitted...

[SmurfButcher Bob]

... in response that RFC.

Lemme get my super-omniscient-archive up and running... oh yes, here it is. Comment #1, in reply to RFC1. Dated 11 seconds after RFC1 was issued:

"It'll never work."

Oddly, Comment #2, which was received within seconds of comment #1, was a cryptic

"Woot! First Comment!"

And th rest, as they say, is history.

Re:Another anniversary today

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're all forgetting the most important anniversary today: the 70th anniversary of the Jones-Connally Farm-Relief Act.

If that doesn't interest you, you could observe the 113th anniversary of the death of P.T. Barnum by buying a Slashdot subscription today.

Let's also not forget the sinking of the Komsomolets fifteen years ago today.

Or for that matter the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower's "domino theory" speech.

A lot of things have happened on the 7th of April.

We didn't have no fancy CRTs - and we LIKED it!

[jpellino]

Ah, the days of our trusty Decwriters - you could pound on those keyboards all day, almost a perfect desk-sized position for pitched-forward sleeping (power off please) and they weighed enough to prop up behind a door if being chased by pirates...

Oldest RFC

[JackAsh]

This may be odd, but a quick jaunt through the archive shows that RFC4 seems to predate it by a few days: it was born on March 24th vs. RFC1's April 7th...

-Jack Ash

Summary of RFC1...

[Mignon]

For those too lazy to check it out themselves, I've provided the following summary of RFC1, translated to modern, Slashdot-ese:

First RFC! W00t!

Re:Another anniversary today

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you just started reading slashdot? In no way is the genocide in Rwanda remotely connected to any story ever published.

Feel free to read CNN.com for your story, however.

story of RFC origin

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a short story of the RFC origin in RFC 1000 by Steve Crocker, the guy who wrote the first RFC and one of the first researchers working on the ARPANET.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1000.html

Adriana

Re:story of RFC origin

[buckeyeguy]

That's pretty handy, as it contains pointers to a lot of interesting early documents (e.g. RFC135, where the 2741 data terminal is described. It wasn't very web-friendly, as it didn't have the > and < characters, among others!)

Re:If Steve Crocker had been a *real* programmer..

[jx100]

Bah, that guy *completely* forgot the Gamma function.

hey

[gargan]

it's my birthday too!

starting with the definition.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have thought the first RFC would have been defining the structure of RFC's

My manager asked me to work on some 'Best Practices' documents to define the consensus of the Right Way To Do Things. Knowing that most people can't handle zero-based numbering, I made the meta-document BP-100.0, which describes the intent of the BP series, and how they can make everyone's life much easier. I posted it to an intranet server at the same time as BP-101.0, which actually accomplishes something.

I consciously mimic the style of RFCs (plain text, 72-char/line limit, with 3-character margin except for section heads), but skipped the page formatting, and came up with a variant numbering system. When a BP is updated, it gets a decimal change. BP-100.0 was actually replaced with BP-100.1 last month because it became clear that some more things needed to be defined in the meta-document.

Re:starting with the definition.

[God! Awful 2]

My manager asked me to work on some 'Best Practices' documents to define the consensus of the Right Way To Do Things. [...] I consciously mimic the style of RFCs (plain text, 72-char/line limit, with 3-character margin except for section heads)

So you don't use zero-based numbering because "most people can't handle it" and yet for the layout, you choose RFC-style 72-char/line plain text?!? Will most of your target audiences be reading these documents on a text-mode dumb terminal?

You must think you're really smart to use the geek format for your documents, but I'm tempted to think you're making it up. No sane person actually writes internet drafts in RFC format. You write them in Word or Latex and then print to a file before submission. (God forbid that someone should lose the template that was used to create the draft!)

-a

RFC 3 is more interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

"RFC 3 - Documentation convention" quote:

"The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion, etc. related to
the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to
be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples
or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques
without introductory or background explication, and explicit questions
without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for
a NWG note is one sentence.
These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons.
First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto
authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of
considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural
hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this
inhibition."

Unfortunatelly, I fall into this category, by not having a name to use as a stool, and a discourse to use as a loudspeak.

Are all the comments in, then?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Request For Comments seems to have been out for quite awhile. Is anything ever going to be concluded?

Okay, who's got more?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, who's got more than 32 hosts (or virtual hosts with different IP numbers) that are within five feet of their current location?

I've got five in my cheapo home office. Whoops, six, counting the DSL modem!

Also, check out the 500 millisecond ping time that they expect.

For those of you who don't remember 1969 ... 16-bit minicomputers with 4K of RAM cost about $50,000, and a 3 BR/2 BA house cost $20,000. 110 baud Teletype ASR-33 was the workhorse terminal.

Obligatory Office Space...

[ryen]

"Can I keep a piece? Because last time I was told that..."
- Milton

RFC 2555 - 30 years of RFC's

[FePe]

Read RFC 2555. It gives an interesting view of inside of the RFC world. It's written by some of the key people that invented and have made RFC's what they are today.

Re:If Steve Crocker had been a *real* programmer..

[Finuvir]

no, RFC0 + RFC0 = RFC0, but RFC0! + RFC0! = RFC2 (= RFC2!)

RFC 4 is older

[stesch]

0004 Network timetable. E.B. Shapiro. Mar-24-1969.
(Format: TXT=5933 bytes) (Status: UNKNOWN)

How it all began.

[Anonymous Coward]

It began like the entire US high tech industry. Funded with tax payers money, developed by the military, eventually privatized once commercially viable.

RFC3098 For Google and Gmail

[Phoe6]

Will This help you Google? RFC 3098
Which is about
How to Advertise Responsibly Using E-Mail and Newsgroups
or - how NOT to MAKE ENEMIES FAST!
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3098.txt

ah, the days of using plain text characters...

[gemtech]

to draw pictures. I've even made simple schematics with text characters. -/\/\/- is a resistor.

So...

[squidfrog]

Al Gore decided not to have his name on this...?

Celebrate!

[SaintDogbert]

RFC, Celebrating 35 years of confusing Internet Developers for various unknown protocols! Now, still in unformatted text! I hate when other people tell me to read the RFCs.. I'm too lazy to read 50 pages of words that dont include one line of code to possibly help :P

Re:Celebrate!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't follow an RFC and create an implementation based on it, you shouldn't be trying to write an implementation. Ask a grownup to help or something.

RFC definition is in RFC 3

[MHV]

Actually, the format for RFC was defined in RFC3, dating also from April 1969:

The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion, etc. related to the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or background explication, and explicit questions without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for a NWG note is one sentence.

These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition.

Re:Another anniversary today

[saforrest]

Moderation of my parent comment thus far:

Starting Score: 1 point
Moderation -2
50% Offtopic
50% Overrated
Extra 'Offtopic' Modifier 0 (Edit)
Total Score: -1

You know, I'm really getting fucking sick of this place. I've heard countless others say it before.

But, Christ, after all this kvetching and moaning every time the fucking U.S. government introduces some stupid bill compromising your rights, you might hope someone here would start to care about politics in general.

I can live with being modded Offtopic, because Rwanda has little to do with an RFC. But 'Overrated'? 'Overrated', when no one had even modded me up yet?

To anyone who read my post and thought "that guy should take his political agenda somewhere else", fuck you.

In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens writes that, each day, he opens the New York Times and sees the little slogan "all the news that's fit to print" and checks if the smug self-satisfaction of that line still pisses him off.

I think I will now have a similar reaction to "stuff that matters".

UCLA! Go Bruins!

[q2a]

I completely forgot that RFC1 came out of UCLA!
Real timing considering that Engineering One was knocked down just a few weeks ago..

Re:Another anniversary today

[saforrest]

Have you just started reading slashdot? In no way is the genocide in Rwanda remotely connected to any story ever published.

Well, there is the September 11th coverage, which is essentially about the slaughter and destruction of civilians for political ends. But that's just because of Slashdot's American-centrism, which is understandable.

I guess I was hoping for it to be somehow mentioned in passing in some way. There is a lot of current but non-technical stuff which is mentioned in passing simply because there is some remote connection with technology.

Feel free to read CNN.com for your story, however.

Thanks; yes, it's covered well there.

God, the first hit on a Google search for Rwanda on foxnews.com turns up this crud, which argues that genocide is a natural consquence of gun control. (Sigh.)

Aha ! Enlightement

[Anonymous Coward]

The Model 33 and Model 35 were upper case only

Obviously these machines were exported in bulk to Nigeria - I can see the million chimps bashing away attempting to write prose - with a couple of shifty looking guys on the side scamming cash for more banannas :-)

Amen Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

32 hosts ought to be enough for anybody!

now i know i'm really a nerd...

[hatrisc]

13 years later, i was born!

I remember when...

[swordgeek]

Oh, wait. No I don't.

carry on.

Interesting tidbits

[achurch]

RFC 25, 1969/10/30 says: ("links" are in essence TCP ports/connections)

NO HIGH LINK NUMBERS

Because it may be desirable to reserve one or more link numbers for instrumentation purposes, and because 256 link numbers are many more than are needed, we suggest that no link number over 63 be used. At UCLA, we will implement our tables to take advantage of this limitation. We also note that 32 may be even more realistic, but 64 is certainly sufficient.

How things have changed...

What a different world it was

[nutznboltz]

A console driver that requires the client to trust the host enough to compile and run source code it sends.

Plus the origins of another big security problem: active mode FTP.

To initiate this class of link, user level programs at both ends of an established TTY-like link must request the establishment of a file-like connection parallel to the TTY-like link.

April 1 2004 RFC

[TheBoostedBrain]

Hey guys. Do you know anything about April 1 RFC for this year?

Re:Another anniversary today

[tehcyder]

God, the first hit on a Google search for Rwanda on foxnews.com turns up this crud, which argues that genocide is a natural consquence of gun control. (Sigh.)

I agree, almost beyond belief.

Now, if someone had posted a story about how two villagers in Rwanda are using Linux, it *would* have been news on /.