Ars Technica’s history of the internet
Jeremy Reimer at, yes, Ars Technica with the first of a three-part series on the history of the internet. I even learned a few little tidbits that I hadn’t known before:
In the meantime, Steve Crocker at the University of California, Los Angeles, was working on a set of software specifications for the host computers. It wouldn’t matter if the IMPs were perfect at sending and receiving messages if the computers themselves didn’t know what to do with them. Because the host computers were part of important academic research, Crocker didn’t want to seem like he was a dictator telling people what to do with their machines. So he titled his draft a “Request for Comments,” or RFC.
This one act of politeness forever changed the nature of computing. Every change since has been done as an RFC, and the culture of asking for comments pervades the tech industry even today.
I’d always wondered where the seemingly ubiquitous “RFC” had come from. This is a good read about those earliest of days, when the number of people on the internet could be measured in…well, let’s just say “could be measured.”