Re: [arch-d] Call for Comment: <draft-iab-fiftyyears-00> (Fifty Years of RFCs)

[Darius Kazemi <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I recently learned of the Fifty Years of RFCs draft (
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-fiftyyears/) and the associated
call for comment. I'd like to offer some commentary on it from what may be
a unique position: I've spent 2019 to date reading and blogging about each
RFC sequentially starting with RFC 1.

In other words, I've been running an RFC history project, and it's been
pretty popular.

One blessing of this project is I get to talk on almost a daily basis with
what I'd call your typical software developer or even your typical internet
user about the RFC series and its history. And there is one piece of
historical context around RFCs that nobody seems to understand, and this
draft might be a good place to set the record straight.

Simply put: it would be nice to highlight that the original RFCs were
coordinated using a physical mailing list of postal addresses and then
distributed via post. That these were sometimes typewritten, and sometimes
even handwritten (in the cases of RFCs 7 and 8). That there were people
manually compiling these lists of addresses, making carbon copies (or
similar), and mailing them out (as seen in early RFCs like RFC 24).

This may seem like a minor note, but I bring this up because I can't
overstate how mind-blowing it is for people to realize that of COURSE these
early inventors and experimenters had to use the postal service. They were
literally inventing the internet!

For many people, this is where interest in the history of RFCs goes from
"that sounds boring" to "that sounds amazing".

Anyway, I only suggest a brief expansion on the sentence in the
introduction about "the distribution method change from postal mail to FTP
and email." (To her credit, Jake Feinler does address this topic
concretely, though still in passing, in RFC 2555.)

Thanks for reading/considering,
Darius Kazemi

P.S. The introduction to the above-mentioned blog series is here:
https://write.as/365-rfcs/365-ietf-rfcs-a-50th-anniversary-dive