Steve Crocker recounts that while they were given this IMP to operate, they kept expecting at some point someone would show up and tell them what they should be doing; they never did show up. While awaiting for direction, it was decided that they needed some system of tracking and recording their work. To that end, Crocker created the Network Working Group (NWG), the forerunner of the Intertnet Configuration Control Board (1979) and the IETF in 1986. NWG meets in Atlanta [Padlipsky] [Salus p 29] [DARPA 1981 II-11 ( "Beyond these two specific contracts, some rather ad hoe mechanisms were pursued to reach agreement between the various research contractors about the appropriate "host protocols" for intercommunicating over the subnetwork. The "Network Working Group" of interested individuals from the various host sites was rather informally encouraged by DARPA. After a time, this Network Working Group became the forum for, and eventually a semi-official approval authority for, the discussion of and issuance of host protocols to be implemented by the various research contractors. Progress in this area was rather slow for a while, but with time, this mechanism eventually was successful in establishing effective host protocols.")]

Crocker was concerned that the act of writing things down would be an assertion of authority. To emphasize that these were not official decrees, the documents produced by this body came to be known as Requests for Comment. Crocker figured that this would go on for a few months until Washington DC stepped in and told them what to do.

"A month later, after a particularly delightful meeting in Utah, it became clear to us that we had better start writing down our discussions. We had accumulated a few notes on the design of DEL and other matters, and we decided to put them together in a set of notes. I remember having great fear that we would offend whomever the official protocol designers were, and I spent a sleepless night composing humble words for our notes. The basic ground rules were that anyone could say anything and that nothing was official. And to emphasize the point, I labeled the notes "Request for Comments." I never dreamed these notes would distributed through the very medium we were discussing in these notes. Talk about Sorcerer's Apprentice!" [RFC 1000] Vint Cerf: "we were just rank amateurs, and we were expecting that some authority would finally come along and say, "Here's how we are going to do it." And nobody ever came along, so we were sort of tentatively feeling our way into how we could go about getting the software up and running." [Cerf, Oral History 1990]

In the early 70s, Jon Postel become the editor of the RFCs. RFCs were maintained by Stanford SRI in its capacity as NIC. The RFCs came to be a function of the Network Working Group. [Roberts, Net Chronology][Crocker NYT ("The early R.F.C.'s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called "rough consensus and running code." Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.")] [Living Internet RFC History ] [IETF RFC 2555, 30 Years of RFCs (7 April 1999)] [Hauben] [Abbate]

ARPANET History 1981 p. III-45

"The initial design of the ARPANET as contained in the RFQ went some way toward specifying certain formats for inter-IMP communications and for AP-to-host communication. Less explicit attention was given to host-to-host communication, this area being left for host sites to work out among themselves. "To provide the hosts with a little impetus to work on the host-to-host problems, DARPA assigned the problem to Elmer Shapiro of SRI. After an initial meeting, S. Crocker, S. Carr, and J. Rulifson met again in the summer and fall of 1968 to continue discussion of host-to-host protocol issues. Their early thinking was at a very high level, e.g., the feasibility of creating a portable front-end package which could be written once and moved to all network hosts; a host desiring to send data to another host would first send a data description to the receiving host which instructed the front-end package at the receiving host hcw to interpret data coming from the sending host. On Valentine's Day, 1969, the first meeting of host representatives and representatives from the NMC and NAC, along 4ith the IMP contractor, was held at BEN in the middle of an enormous snow storm. "In April 1969, a series of working notes called Request for Comments (RFCs) was established, which could be circulated to let others know what they were doing and to obtain the reactions and involvement of other interested parties. They called themselves the Network Working Group (NWG). "The NWG eventually grew quite large, with representatives from almost every host site in the network participating, and mountains of paper was circulated describing and commenting on various protocols. There were also occasional mass meetings. From about the time it was decided that he would go to DARPA until near the time he left DARPA. Stephen Crocker served as chairman of the NWG. By the beginning of 1972 the NWG had grown too large, but much of its work was done -- large numbers of hosts were communicating over the network. From this point onward, meetings were limited to those of an executive protocol committee which iet to discuss general protocol issues and provide guidance for Crocker, and to those of various subcommittees, e.g., the group interested in the Remote Job Entry protocol. Even after the big meetings stopped, most participant working notes were circulated to most other participants in the network. "Gradually the activities of the NWG began to diminish. Many of the host site personnel who had originally been active moved on to other tasks, and new users joining the network tended to 0se the defined protocols rather than becoming involved in their specification. As Crocker's time for the NWG group became increasingly limited, he appointed Alex McKenzie and Jon Postel to serve jointly in his place. McKenzie and Postel interpreted their task to be one of codification and coordination primarily, and after a fe4 more spurts of activity the protocol definition process settled for the most part inio the status of a maintenance effort.

Host Protocol