Please please please mention that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel (aka "god of the Internet") was the RFC editor--he did a huge amount of work to make it a success.
"The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them."
"Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, Instructions to RFC Authors. Between 1982 and 1984 Postel co-authored the RFCs which became the foundation of today's DNS (RFC 819, RFC 881, RFC 882 and RFC 920) which were joined in 1995 by RFC 1591 which he also co-wrote. In total, he wrote or co-authored more than 20 RFCs.[12]"
And from the RFC article:
"From 1969 until 1998, Jon Postel served as the RFC editor. On his death in 1998, his obituary was published as RFC 2468.[12]" (written by Vint Cerf)
"Beginning with the ARPANET, an endless
stream of networks evolved, and ultimately were interlinked to become
the Internet. Someone had to keep track of all the protocols, the
identifiers, networks and addresses and ultimately the names of all
the things in the networked universe. And someone had to keep track
of all the information that erupted with volcanic force from the
intensity of the debates and discussions and endless invention that
has continued unabated for 30 years. That someone was Jonathan B.
Postel, our Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, friend, engineer,
confidant, leader, icon, and now, first of the giants to depart from
our midst."
"Bearded and sandaled, Jon was our
resident hippie-patriarch at UCLA. "
Actually, Jon often padded around the CompSci department at Boelter Hall barefoot.
"He leaves a legacy of edited documents that tell our collective Internet story, including not only the technical but also the poetic and whimsical as well."
"One can also read that Jon was the editor of the RFC, and may think
that Jon checked only the grammar or the format of the RFCs. Nothing
could be further from the truth, not that he did not check it, but in
addition, being the corporate memory, Jon had indicated many times to
authors that earlier work had treated the same subject, and that
their work would be improved by learning about that earlier work."
...
" Our foundation and infrastructure of standards was the secret weapon
that won the war. Jon created it, using the RFC mechanism initiated
by Steve Crocker. It was Jon who immediately realized their
importance, and the need for someone to act as the curator, and
volunteered.
The lightning speed with which Microsoft joined the Internet was not
possible without the quality of the existing standards that were so
well documented.
During the transition from ARPA, through the NSF, to the commercial
world there was a point in which the trivial funding required for the
smooth operation of editing and distributing the RFCs was in doubt.
At that time the prospect of not having funds to run this operation
was very real. Finally the problem was solved and the process
suffered no interruption.
What most of the involved agencies and managers did not know is that
there was never a danger of any interruption. Jon would have done it
even with no external funding. If they did not pay him to do it, he
would have paid them to let him do it. For him it was not a job, it
was labor of love."
" When fancy formatting creeped into the Internet community, Jon
resisted the temptation to allow fancy formats for RFCs. Instead, he
insisted on them being in ASCII, easy to e-mail, guaranteed to be
readable anywhere in the world. The instant availability and
usability of RFCs was much more important to him than how fancy they
looked."
I’ve updated the post accordingly and mentioned more names, Jibal. I also referenced our conversation here, thanks again. The revised post should be visible now, though sometimes clearing cookies helps if it doesn’t show up right away
I think there's a fair argument to be made that this was a bad decision on Postel's part, because it made it harder to have good diagrams as well as mathematical formula, and of course it also meant that we couldn't render many people's names correctly. In any case, RFCs are now published in HTML and allow non-ASCII characters.
It's a treasure. I feel for those expressing their loss - and at the same time am slightly in awe that IANA used to be "just some guy" - this plus the April Fool tradition gives the RFC series a very approachable human feeling.
Nowadays, my friend, people just copy, paste, or vibecode everything. If you (or anyone) think they’re not forgotten, you’re one of the few who still read and understand the RFCs. Said that in the post too.
The people building the infrastructure powering the internet at cloudflare, major cloud providers, isps, etc are all regularly reading and referencing RFCs (from experience). People who aren't reading them now weren't reading them in the past either, we don't need some RFC moral panic.
I agree. RFCs have a niche use case, like a manual, or a glossary. They're there, if you need them, but few people are supposed to be implementing RFCs or internet from "blueprints" all the time.
I don't think they're that niche. If you want to know what an email address can contain or what a cname should be, just read the RFC.
They're surprisingly easy to read and I'd encourage any younger readers to have a look at ones that are appropriate to your field. You'll almost certainly learn something new and it's good to have a grasp of these fundamentals.
Which RFC? The challenge as with all technical specifications is that you have revisions over time and even some times get split up into multiple RFCs. And then as with all interoper issues, is the RFC that you implement the one that other systems you’re interacting with also implementing that RFC. And then even after all of that, you have implementation differences where even if you follow the RFC to the letter, other implementations either made intentional alternate legal choices or had bugs.
RFCs are generally easy to read but there’s a meaningful chasm between understanding the RFC and what actually gets implemented in practice.
I don’t know what niche you inhabit, but anecdotally the overwhelming majority of engineers I know have consulted an RFC. RFCs are an active component in the Internet; you need to at least reference them (if not fully read them) to understand how various parts of the Internet interoperate.
(It seems extremely unlikely that the average non-junior engineer hasn’t opened up RFC 3339 or one of the HTTP caching RFCs, just for example.)
I dunno, I think many dev are aware of the existence of RFCs, but if your work occurs at higher levels of the stack there is frequently not a pressing need to read them.
For example, you don't have to read the specific RFC to know the difference between 200, 400, and 500 status codes. Any layman's blog post (or literally just reading the response messages accompanying those codes in actual use) is enough knowledge to get you real far.
That said; if a senior dev isn't aware of 3339, the holiest of RFCs, then that's a problem.
There's a strong inverse correlation in my career between how often a dev refers to RFCs by number alone and how much I ever want to interact (let alone work) with them again.
Thanks for the summary of the document, but not quite what I asked for. Why would e.g. a VHDL engineer need to have read it to deserve the title senior?
Well you are kinda straw manning me, considering my own words were "that's a problem" and not "don't deserve a title senior engineer". I also specifically said "senior dev" and not "senior engineer", which are very different things. Maybe re-read the comment chain with fresh eyes, since you seem to have taken a very antagonistic interpretation?
I think most people here can agree that seniors should be aware of standards for recording time. If you know you should write a date as "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss" (add precision or timezone information as required) then congratulations you are aware of the necessary standards.
Personally, I have about a dozen related RFCs on my bookmarks toolbar due to a project that I worked on. I was referencing them constantly when I was actively working on that project.
It's like saying the the proof of, say, Seifert-van Kampen theorem is "forgotten" because nowadays, my friend, people ask ChatGPT to write out solutions to their math homework.
The fact that you are able to send this message over the internet is proof that a quite large population of people are still reading and still understand internet standards.
