Ode to RFCs and Jon Postel
Ode to RFCs and Jon Postel
The Editor of the Internet
Introduction
So while there is much debate around people like Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cert, we should also include “The Editor of the Internet”: Jon Postel. Jon was born on 6 August 1943 and died in October 1998. Even up to his death, he was the editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) documents and administered the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). He has since, in 2012, been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society, and the foundation he has left is as strong as any foundation ever created, in fact, it’s the foundation for our Cyber Age.
So, as we will see, the Internet has built around many of the systems and protocols that it needed in 1981. The Internet and Web then grew without the constraints of governments and standards agencies, but, with its scope now threatening societies with the Dark Web and terrorists sending encrypted messages, politicians now feel it's time to put controls on its usage — are they too late?
Should they have got involved in 1981, and built in the mechanisms that they require now, and can they actually change the core of the Internet?
RFCs
RFC (Request For Comment) documents are a way for standards such as for HTTP and email to become accepted quickly, and where organisations such as DARPA posted their thoughts for the standard, and quickly publish them based on the received comments. Developers could then go ahead and implement the system against the standards, without the massive overhead of taking them to international standards agencies like the ISO (International Standard Organisation) or the IEEE. With these agencies, a standard would take years to develop, and often involved the tinkering from countries, in order to protect their industries, and thus often stifled innovation.
While first was published in 1969 (with RFC1), the classics first started to appear in 1981, and which now provide the core of the Internet:
- RFC 791 which defines the format of IP packets (IPv4)
- RFC 793 which defines TCP (Transport Control Protocol), and the foundation of virtually all of the traffic that exists on the Internet.
Many protocols, although now limited, became de-facto standards, and have moved on little since, including HTTP (HyperText Transmission Protocol) 1.1 which was initially created as RFC 1945.
So it was in September 1981 that the true foundation of the standardisation of the Internet communications was born:
For RFC 783 we have:
September 1981 Transmission Control Protocol
PREFACE
This document describes the DoD Standard Transmission Control Protocol
(TCP). There have been nine earlier editions of the ARPA TCP
specification on which this standard is based, and the present text
draws heavily from them. There have been many contributors to this work
both in terms of concepts and in terms of text. This edition clarifies
several details and removes the end-of-letter buffer-size adjustments,
and redescribes the letter mechanism as a push function.
Jon Postel Editor
Sandwiched in-between the two classics, was another one, which did not have the same impact, but has helped to debug a billion systems: Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) — RFC 782. So RFC791, RFC792 and RFC793 has since changed the course of our societies.
The impact of the IP and TCP standards cannot be under-estimated in terms of their impact on our society, and certainly rate alongside “The Wheel” and “The Transistor” as some of the most disruptive technologies ever created. Its standardization supported a whole range of activities, and basically allow the Internet to boot up quickly. If nation-states had controlled the Internet, it would have ended up being licenced, and locked down in its growth. Without the massive growth of the spread of the protocols, the Internet would have died as quickly as it had been created. With standards and government agencies controlling its every more. For Jon, he just gathered the required methods for the standards and posted them for everyone to review. If you missed it, you really couldn’t contribute until the next version came along.
For something like HTTP, which provides the core of most of what we do on the Web, it started with 1.0 (with the input from Tim Berners-Lee) with RFC1945 (in 1996) and then developed on HTTP 1.1 as RFC2068 (in 1997). Basically in the 18 years since, very little has changed with the core HTTP protocol, as it quickly becomes as standard. New methods of using in — such as with REST Web services — actually made use of all the things that were not really used when accessing static Web pages.
The lack of thought to security is highlighted by the fact that it took to RFC 1508 before the word “Security” was included in the title (Sept 1993), which was more than 12 years since the IP packet definition (Sept 1981).
So it was 1981 when TCP and IP were created, and two major other things happened around the time that supported the growth of the Internet. The first was the release of the PC by IBM, and the other was when Leonard Bosack networked the Stanford University computer science department’s computers, along with Sandy Lerner. Their knowledge was then used to create the router, and the formation of Cisco in 1984. At its core was the implementation of the IP and TCP standards.
Thank you for email, remote access and lots more…
It’s not just TCP, IP and HTTP that we have to thank Jon for, it’s all the other protocols he helped standardize. The way that we use Web addresses, such as http://asecuritysite.com/challenges, was standardized in RFC 1738 — Uniform Resource Locators (URL), and which is something that we just take for granted, but without it, we really couldn’t create our integrated infrastructure.
And without Jon, we would have to remember the IP address of every Web site we wanted to visit — for that he standardised domain names and their mapping to IP addresses with RFC1035.
And how can I connect a computer to the Internet, and every computer in the whole knows it’s there — well that one is a shy little protocol — ARP — Address Resolution Protocol — the most horrible and beautiful of all the protocols. It was published as RFC826 (standardized in1982), and allow the discovery of computers on a local network by a network gateway. Without ARP, we would have to create a massive database that kept a copy of all the computers which connect to the Internet. With it, computers are discovered, and connectable.
In the early phases of the Internet, it was not the Web that was the “killer app”, it was electronic mail. The large scale adoption of email was indebted to Jon with standards around the sending emails (SMTP — Simple Mail Transport Protocol — RFC821 — defined in 1982) and reading it (POP — Post Office Protocol — RFC960) — defined in 1985). Often, though, the first, and even the second version, was not enough, and some protocols, such as POP-3 (RFC1939) and IMAP-4 (RFC1730), went through a few major iterations to become the worldwide de-facto standard.
The greatest challenge for the Internet when it was first created was how it would scale, so that new computers and networks could be added, and discovered by the rest of “The Internet”.
I must here define “The Internet”, as it is different from “the internet”. Basically “The Internet” uses publicly defined IP addresses, whereas “the internet” is not publicly routable.
The key to this, along with IP Version 4, was routing protocols, which were used to find the best way to a destination, and involved routers intercommunicating to discover new networks. The first of these “routing protocols” were fairly simple, just measuring the number of hops that it took to get from one network to another. And so Jon posted RFC1058 for RIP (Routing Information Protocol) Version 1.
Before RFCs, large companies often defined the standards, especially IBM, and who could force the market to abide by their interface, and who could thus control the market. This monopoly was completely broken by Jon, and few companies could release new standards unless they had been standardized by RFCs.
Conclusions
So a world where the government are becoming increasingly worried about the scope of the Internet, and where they feel that have little control, it is to Jon that we turn, as he was the person who grabbed their control and let it flourish. So as we move into an uncertain period in the Cyber Age, where the rights of the individual are debated against the rights of society, we have to be careful about the way that the Internet has control, and it is the core standards which define it, and no politician in the world can turn back the tide, and take back control. The Internet is free from control, and that is how Jon created it — the true Editor of the Internet.
So thank you Jon!
May you rest in peace … with two documents … IP Version 4 and TCP … and a whole lot more … you edited the greatest machine ever … and one which can bring benefit to every single person on the planet!
For politicians and those who aim to control the Internet — it’s too late — you had a request to comment, and you missed it!
Very few of the standards created, whether in networking or cryptography, are a secret, and the network infrastructure of the Internet was created where there is no respect for any type of boundary, especially national borders, so politicians who think that the Internet can be re-modelled and changed to re-engineer the protocols have a major task in constraining it to their borders. The days of physical borders stopping communications have gone.
Jon Postel died on 16 October 1998, at the age of 55, but he has left a lasting legacy with the standards he helped draft, and which has created the great machine in the history of humankind.