's precursor, the ARPANET, grew out of some research efforts on packet-switching technology that began at the end of 1964 with just four interconnected computers. From the beginning of the 1970s, the ARPANET used Network Control Protocol (NCP) for host-to-host transport. The first work on IP began dur- ing the same period, and although IP soon became the dominant network- layer protocol in the ARPANET, it wasn't until January 1983 when migration from NCP to IP finally ended. Today, the Internet is the largest IP network in the world. Origins of the Request For Comments (RFCs) ARPANET was developed within the research and academic community, with its strong tradition of sharing results and ideas. The research Chapter 2 community is an open environment that creates quick development. The pace at which the ARPANET evolved proved to be extremely quick. The community quickly determined that the model of academic publications, which often takes more than a year in review and production, was too stodgy to support Internet-style growth and innovation. In order to avoid this bottleneck, new documents called Request For Comments (RFCs) were created in 1969 by the community. In much the same way operators issue Request For Information (RFIs) and Request For Products (RFPs) to get feedback from vendors, individuals within the Inter- net community issued RFCs to get feedback and ideas from others involved in similar work. This information could be distributed fast and accessed for free. The idea was to gather all the feedback on a specific RFC in one place and to publicly identify open issues. After all the necessary discussions, when consensus was reached, a technical specification could be developed without encountering continual obstacles. The first RFCs were written by researchers working at the same loca- tion. Later, the appearance of e-mail enabled RFC authors to be much more widely distributed. Mailing lists gained increasing importance in the stan- dardization process and currently, it is common to find RFCs written 