and RIPE NCC managed to serve WHOIS data via RESTful web services. The charter (drafted in February 2012) provided for separate specifications, for number registries first and for name registries to follow. The working group produced five proposed standard documents: 7480 - 7481 - 7482 - 7483 - 7484 - and an informational document: 7485 - Protocol The WHOIS protocol had its origin in the ARPANET NICNAME protocol and was based on the NAME/FINGER Protocol, described in (1977). The NICNAME/WHOIS protocol was first described in in 1982 by Ken Harrenstien and Vic White of the Network Information Center at SRI International. WHOIS was originally implemented on the Network Control Protocol (NCP) but found its major use when the TCP/IP suite was standardized across the ARPANET and later the Internet. The protocol specification is the following (original quote): Connect to the service host TCP: service port 43 decimal NCP: ICP to socket 43 decimal, establishing two 8-bit connections Send a single "command line", ending with <CRLF>. Receive information in response to the command line. The server closes its connections as soon as the output is finished. The command line server query is normally a single name specification. i.e. the name of a resource. However, servers accept a query, consisting of only the question mark (?) to return a description of acceptable command line formats. Substitution or wild-card formats also exist, e.g., appending a full-stop (period) to the query name returns all entries beginning with the query name. On the modern Internet, WHOIS services are typically communicated using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Servers listen to requests on the well-known port number 43. Clients are simple applications that establish a communications channel to the server, transmit a text record with the name of the resource to be queried and await the response in form of a sequence of text records found in the database. This simplicity of the protocol also permits an application, and a command line interface user, to query a WHOIS server using the Telnet protocol. Augmentations In 2014, June ICANN published the recommendation for status codes, the "Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) domain status codes" Implementation WHOIS lookups were traditionally performed with a command line interface application, but now many alternative web-based tools exist. A WHOIS database consists of a set of text records for each resource. These text records consists of various items of information about the resource itself,