Most of the Internet protocols have been document in Requests For Comments (RFCs). Initially, these documents were simply a set of notes that were exchanged among networking researchers. The first of these RFCs was published on April 7th, 1969, 50 years ago.

After half of century, there are now more than 8500 RFCs that have been published and this number continues to grow. Thanks to the utilisation of plain ASCII text to write those RFCs, the entire series remains easy to read and to update. Another important point for the dissemination of the RFCs was that they were freely available to anyone, while many standardisation bodies restrict their documents to paying participants. Several posts have described the evolution of these RFCs, see e.g. :

• Heather Flanagan, the current RFC Series Editor, celebrates the RFC birthday on Fifty Years of RFCs and is finalising an special RFC
• Dan York’s post on Celebrating 50 Years of the RFCs That Define How the Internet Works

This blog post was written to inform the readers of Computer Networking : Principles, Protocols and Practice about the evolution of the field. You can subscribe to the Atom feed for this blog at https://obonaventure.github.io/cnp3blog/feed.xml.