April 7, 1969: Birth of That Thing We Call the Internet

[Dee Dee Warren]

1969: The publication of the first “request for comments,” or RFC, documents paves the way for the birth of the internet.

April 7 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology. RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to kick around new ideas in a public forum; sometimes, these ideas are adopted as new standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

:b_day:

[$cirisme]

link?

[Dee Dee Warren]

crap

http://www.wired.com/science/discove...dayintech_0407

[Pilgrim]

crap

http://www.wired.com/science/discove...dayintech_0407

Should we send a card to Al Gore? Or is that on Father's Day?

[lee_merrill]

Here by the way is RFC 1. It's a hoot now, the proposal is 5 bits for the host address! If I'm understanding correctly. That would mean you could have 32 whole computers on the Internet. They apparently then expanded this a good bit, to 32 bits (why would there ever be more than 4 billion computer addresses?! Well, they did run out of addresses, actually).

Blessings,
Lee

[$cirisme]

Here by the way is RFC 1. It's a hoot now, the proposal is 5 bits for the host address! If I'm understanding correctly. That would mean you could have 32 whole computers on the Internet. They apparently then expanded this a good bit, to 32 bits (why would there ever be more than 4 billion computer addresses?! Well, they did run out of addresses, actually).

Blessings,
Lee

Considering computers were the size of rooms and cost a lot of money, having 32 computers online was VERY ambitious! 4 billion even more so!