Converged Networks with Lab
Explanation of the RFC and the Internet Draft In this paper, my purpose is to educate the reader and by the end of this paper, you will be more informed on these following concepts; what the RFC is what an Internet Draft is, as well as the organization that produces the documents and lastly, the process that allows the documents to be produced. This paper will briefly tour the history behind these concepts and show how they are affecting our Internet usage. The RFC stands for Request for Comments and it was created by a man named Steve Crocker. Currently the RFC is a publication stemming from the Internet Society and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Standards are usually set by these governing bodies over The Internet. Shortly before they were created, Steve was working with a group of staff and graduate students at U.C.L.A. At that time he had just graduated and was working on a project funded by the Government. The project dealt with communication over a network that connected the four research centers together. Teams from all the research centers collaborated on the project. Once Steve and others a part of the team begin to inform people, receive input, and form new ideas, “we’d put together a few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, the rules by which computers exchange information, I offered to organize our early notes.” (CROCKER). After Steve started organizing and making informal memos, he wanted to avoid sounding as if he was making official decisions on the protocols of The Internet, so he created the Request For Comments. This was a process for implementing standards and once more input came into, “choosing standards eventually became more formal, unnamed meetings grew larger and organized into the Network Working Group. The Working Group is also known as ARPA, which is the Advanced Research Projects Agency. In
Cited: CROCKER, S. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html?_r=2&em& IETF. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ietf.org/id-info/