7 April 13

Today's tie honors the 44th anniversary of the publication of "RFC 1." In 1969 I was a high school sophomore, and like essentially 100% of all humans, I was blissfully unaware of the event in network communications technology that would become the foundation for the global Internet. RFC 1 laid out the protocol (like grammar rules) by which interconnected computers could "talk to each other," over what was then called ARPA Net. The principal author, Steve Crocker of UCLA, used these words to describe RFC 1: "I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm, and reactions are expected." The historically-invaluable document itself was first rendered as electronic text twenty-eight years later.