Biografia e approfondimenti
The Birth of Arpanet
Roughly one year before the start of ARPANET, graduate students from the first four host sites (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah) gathered in Santa Barbara for an informal meeting. They discussed the development of protocols that would allow their different computers to talk to the IMPs and to each other. The group agreed to continue meeting to work out the protocols, and became known as the Network Working Group (NWG). Heading the NWG were two graduate students from UCLA, Vinton Cerf and Steve Crocker. They realized that to keep the momentum of the group going, they would need to keep notes on their meetings. This led Crocker to write what he called a "Request for Comments" (RFC) describing the basic programming needed to allow two computers to communicate. RFC 1, dated April 1969, was more than just a simple memo, but the start of an open communication process that would allow computer scientists to discuss their ideas for standards with the entire computer science community. Because the RFC was open to others thoughts and suggestions, many people contributed their ideas for the development of protocols. "RFCs have been the principal means of open expression in the computer networking community, the accepted way of recommending, reviewing, and adopting new technical standards."[28]