RFC 1
Year First Appeared
1969
Creator
Steve Crocker
In RFC 1, Item 4 corresponds to Section IV, Initial Experiments, which outlines the first planned trials on the nascent ARPA Network, notably SRI’s modification of its online retrieval system to operate via Model 35 teletypes with control written in DEL.
Importance in Internet Culture
These experiments shifted early ARPANET thinking from mere host connectivity to interactive remote use and terminal control across the network, while RFC 1 itself inaugurated the RFC series, an open, iterative publication process that became the Internet’s standardization backbone and the first online technical publication series.
Interesting Fact
DEL was later specified as the Decode-Encode Language (RFC 5), designed to locally handle console input/output and structure display data for networked sessions. And the term ‘Request for Comments’ was intentionally humble, Crocker, heeding Bill Duvall’s suggestion, chose it to make clear that ‘anyone could say anything’ and that nothing was yet official.