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April 9, 2009

Exactly forty years and two days ago, the first RFC (Request For Comments) was released on April 7, 1969. In RFC No. 1, Steve Crocker described the software architecture of the emerging ARPANET. Today, the Arpanet is now what we called the Internet, and has certainly come a long way since.

Nevertheless, today's Internet still uses about 70 percent of the same components and basically a very similar network structure that the Arpanet used 40 years ago.

The Arpanet was actually designed and built mainly to ensure long-term and reliable communications between the Pentagon, the White House and a few universities in case of an attack or a major war launched against the U.S.

The original RFCs were actual contributions to discussions within a "Network Working Group" of manageable size (RFC 2 is a direct answer to RFC 1, and so on and so forth). As the group was still working on the ARPANET setup, the first RFCs were exchanged on paper only.

Over a lenght of time, the RFCs became the standard documents of the ARPANET and of its later successor, the Internet. The network's astronomical growth was reflected in the number of RFCs released. After a phase of intensive discussion during the development of the ARPANET, there was a period of calm in which the network itself required less attention.

But in the late 1970s there was a technological surge, and since the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol, the network and RFCs have developed at the same rate. For example, the 2,555th RFC discussed the first 30 years of RFC history. Almost 3,000 texts have been added in the 10 years since.

In deed, the Internet has grown a lot since, and continues to grow at an exponential rate, global recession or not...

Of course, it's not just the number of RFCs that has increased, but also the length of the individual standards. For example, the definition of the Post Office Protocol (POP3) from 1985 comprises a lean 24 pages of information that any reasonably talented programmer can rapidly implement in servers and clients.

In sheer comparison, the admittedly more powerful IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) has been the subject of no less than 183 RFCs with numerous pages, dating back to 1994. This is not only due to the growing performance of modern protocols and the Internet's transformation from a mere research project to a global communications network that is simply mind boggling.

Overall, political and economic interests have also become increasingly important factors in technological decisions. The Internet certainly isn't any different.

For example, this becomes very obvious from the growing average number of authors per RFC, and from the fact that the majority of authors no longer work at universities, but in such large commercial enterprises such as IBM, Microsoft, Novell, HP, etc. But some still work at MIT nevertheless...

RFCs have also increased not only in number but also in length. Incidentally, more text doesn't always mean more clarity! The many arguments about protocol details between the programmers of IMAP servers and the RFC group are legendary.

The intensive discussions were followed by a quiet period of several years, until the expansion of the global Internet led to a sharp increase in the number of RFCs. Exponential in nature.

Take for example Jon Postel, who was an RFC contributor from 1970 and held the post of lead RFC editor until he died in 1998. Another Internet oldtimer is the venerable Vint Cerf which many will recall actually released his own obituary in the form of an RFC...

However, such non-technical RFCs still continue to appear more and more as time goes by. The most well-known of them are probably the April fool's day RFCs which have been released regularly for the past 20 years.

These texts are often satirical takes on current technological developments, for example the BLOAT protocol of 2002, which tries to replace IP addresses as well as UDP and TCP ports with XML technology!

Surprisingly, there was no April fool's day RFC in 2006 of all years, when a particularly high number of RFCs were released. Could it be the RFC editors were so busy they forgot to release an April fool's prank? The April 2006 list of RFCs does not appear to contain an obvious candidate.

Another mystery is RFC 31, which appears to be about a year older than RFC 1, having allegedly been released in February 1970. Both the data in RFC 30 and RFC 32 and the RFC's content, however, rather indicate a release in 1971, so there's still some confusion left in the RFC segment of the Network of all Networks.

From the very beginning, RFCs were an open platform for discussions, and had every right to be so. RFC 3 already dealt with the form and distribution of the notes and explicitly states that the Network Working Group is open to new members.

Once the network was able to offer the required services or its protocol version, the next logical step was to collect the RFCs online. Thus, the ARPANET was based on open standards right from the start. The initially rather coincidental RFC concept was one of the most important factors that contributed to the success of what is now known as the Internet.

Had it not been built on open standards, the Internet certainly would not be what it is today. Most observers agree strongly on that statement.

Other sectors of the emerging IT industry tended to regard their developments as inventions, protected them with many patents and only released them at a much later stage. Some never released them at all, and to this day are still not released!

Overall, the shortest text released is the now the inconsequential RFC 18. The longest is RFC 4949, which is a huge glossary of security terms that will make your head spin in all directions!

Those who are interested in this type of statistics can find further online samples on the pages of RFC author Jari Arkko. Just type in 'Jari Arkko' in Google and read all about it there.

Source: Tech Blog.

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