The first RFC was released in April 1969

Exactly forty years and two days ago, the first RFC (Request For Comments) was released on April 7, 1969. In RFC No. 1, Steve Crocker described the software architecture of the emerging ARPANET. Today, the Arpanet is now what we called the Internet, and has certainly come a long way since.

The Arpanet was actually designed and built mainly to ensure long-term and reliable communications between the Pentagon, the White House and a few universities in case of an attack or a major war launched against the U.S.

The original RFCs were actual contributions to discussions within a "Network Working Group" of manageable size (RFC 2 is a direct answer to RFC 1, and so on and so forth). As the group was still working on the ARPANET setup, the first RFCs were exchanged on paper only.

Over a lenght of time, the RFCs became the standard documents of the ARPANET and of its later successor, the Internet. The network's astronomical growth was reflected in the number of RFCs released. After a phase of intensive discussion during the development of the ARPANET, there was a period of calm in which the network itself required less attention.

But in the late 1970s there was a technological surge, and since the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol, the network and RFCs have developed at the same rate. For example, the 2,555th RFC discussed the first 30 years of RFC history. Almost 3,000 texts have been added in the 10 years since.

In deed, the Internet has grown a lot since, and continues to grow at an exponential rate, global recession or not...

Of course, it's not just the number of RFCs that has increased, but also the length of the individual standards. For example, the definition of the Post Office Protocol (POP3) from 1985 comprises a lean 24 pages of information that any reasonably talented programmer can rapidly implement in servers and clients.