Apr 7, 1969 — The Most Important Document of the Internet: RFC 1
April 7, 1969
The Internet is essentially a miracle because it did not emerge in laboratories and technology companies. Practically anyone had the opportunity to participate in its development.
Just like today. Any Internet user has the tools to add something and possibly change the Internet forever. Thanks to open source, every developer can propose improvements to the most fundamental components of the Internet.
We should thank the enthusiasts of the past for this openness. They realized that open communication can lead to better solutions and ideas for implementing complex products and systems. This is the reason why the IT industry is the most rapidly developing technical industry. A huge number of ideas and solutions become public. Because of this, these ideas and solutions spread faster and improve. When an open source community works on a solution, it evolves faster than inside the dusty laboratories of commercial companies.
RFC 1
RFC 1 is one of the most important documents behind the Internet. The idea of RFC (Request for Comments) was to find a way for computers to communicate with each other in order to create a shared network. By the late 1960s, several computer networks already existed, but communicating between them was complicated. They used different protocols for exchanging information. RFC was created as a forum for discussing protocols and approaches to building a common network between computers.
The author of RFC 1, Steve Crocker, wrote it at night after work. He explained how computers communicate via the ARPANET network (one of the largest computer networks of that time).
Today, it does not matter what the content of RFC 1 itself is. What matters is the approach Steve Crocker proposed. He did not publish this document as a standard or a protocol specification. He invited people to discuss!
This approach appealed to developers, and they began proposing their own protocols and solutions, creating more and more RFCs.
RFC today
Today, the RFC series contains more than 9000 documents. After 65 years, RFC has indeed become a collection of standards and strict protocol specifications. But discussions and proposals for changes can now happen almost everywhere.
Every open-source software project has a bug tracker or an Issues section on GitHub where people can write about ideas and difficulties they encountered while using a particular component.
Over the past fifteen years, many corporations have made their proprietary technologies open source — because trust in open source has become higher than in proprietary technologies. It is part of programmers’ DNA that a software system that cannot be discussed does not deserve trust.
This is fantastic! Thanks to RFC!