Request for Comments or "How the Internet Got Its Rules"

I never knew how the original Internet protocols were designed and implemented, and how they shaped what we now take for granted. Today is the 40th Anniversary of the "Request for Comments." The R.F.C.s were born in 1968, long before the WWW (or email!), and were memos written (and often shared via the U.S. Postal Service and Xerox machines) among nascent computer scientists to share ideas and information about early network protocols. Although the original R.F.C.s are now obsolete, they evolved into the standard method of publishing Internet protocol standards. What they meant for the average- to below-average-skilled user like me is that they were foundational to an Internet culture valuing transparency, the free exchange of ideas and vetting by peer review. In forty short years, that's a major accomplishment. To read more, see the following by Stephen Crocker, the originator of the R.F.C.s.: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html?ref=opinion