‘Eureka’ moment as humble graduate offering leads to birth of internet

In a friend's bathroom at 3am in April 1969, a University of California, Los Angeles graduate student by the name of Steve Crocker started to write one of the most important documents of the last century.

Although drafted in humble circumstances, Crocker’s document would set the open, inclusive tone of the next half century of internet engineering culture and initiate the process of defining the rules that govern virtually all data exchange on the planet.

Crocker was de facto leader of a small band of graduate students working on the problem of how computers at their four research centres should talk to each other on an experimental network called the Arpanet.

In the twilight hours, for fear of waking the friends he was visiting, he drafted the students’ first written output.

He had no idea of the enormity of what he was beginning.

Request For Comments, now known as RFC 1, would become the first of thousands in a series that continues to define internet standards today.

Crocker and his fellow graduate students worked on the network because most of their superiors viewed it as “a sideshow, an intrusion”.

The Arpanet had been foisted on several key research centres by the US department of defence's advanced research projects agency (Darpa), a major funding body.


Networking
Darpa believed that networking the enormously expensive computers at major research laboratories across the country would enable new laboratories to share these machines instead of buying their own, saving the taxpayer millions of dollars in the process.

Once Darpa’s contractors had built the physical hardware for the network, the professors passed off responsibility for connecting their own computers to each other downward, to their graduate students.

“In the US,” Crocker says, “one of the common sayings is that graduate students are the second-lowest form of life on the university campus.”

However, he remembers, “nobody had told us we were in charge”. The graduates started to work without any formal authority, visiting each other’s laboratories from August 1968 onward.

Ironically for a computer networking project intended to reduce the need for physical meetings, they quickly realised that they would need to set aside a large budget for travel.

By March 1969, when they began to write down their ideas, Crocker, who had volunteered to organise the notes, started worrying about RFC 1.

Being at the bottom of the academic hierarchy and fearing opprobrium from the top made it difficult to draft authoritative documentation.


Nerves
Crocker had always found writing difficult (although he is a pleasure to read), but this particular document, he reveals 44 years later, made him "very nervous that we were going to get yelled at, that we were going to get criticised for being presumptuous".

Crocker started losing sleep over the problem, hence the 3am bathroom session.

However, what emerged as a result was an open and inclusive mode of collaboration that set the tone for later movements such as open source, Linux and Wikinomics.

To hedge against opprobrium from above he gave his text a humble title, Request For Comments, and made its tone as inclusive as possible.

In RFC 3, he elaborated on the rules for future RFCs.

In effect, there was none. An RFC could be contributed by anyone and could be as short as a sentence.

"These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto authoritative and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas.

“Second, there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition.”

A later elaboration of this principle by Dave Clarke of the internet engineering taskforce was: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."

The graduate students were able to take this freewheeling approach thanks to a “very, very light hand from Washington”. Both US government and military had learned the importance of investing in scientific research during the second World War.

"That wisdom, in a certain sense, led to a very expansive role in terms of funding research with an adult or evolved understanding that you must not try to control exactly everything that was going on, that it's important to cast your bread upon the waters and wait and see what happens."


Funding
Crocker is concerned about the level of scientific funding in the United States.

Darpa, which supported the early work on the internet, “was given extremely broad authority to create technology and not ask permission but just go do it”.

It had been founded in response to the launch of Sputnik, which demonstrated Soviet mastery of rocketry and galvanised radical research and development in the US in the late 1950s.

Crocker fears that the highest level of government is distracted from long-term R&D.

He says that whereas the second World War and the Cold War focused minds, "we do not yet have a crisis that is competing at the same level".


Privacy
As our conversation moves on to privacy, Crocker says there is no perfect solution.

“Privacy is a two-edged sword. If you walk into a hotel that you have frequented before and the concierge greets you by name and has your favourite drink waiting, is that a violation of your privacy or is that high-quality service?”

In social terms, Crocker says, our norms and expectations are likely to change over time.

“Our world has moved from one of small towns, where everybody knew pretty much everything there was to know about you, to the anonymity of big cities. Now we’re moving back.”

The result of this reversion to small-town intimacy is that, on the one hand “keeping secrets is going to be harder and harder”, but on the other hand, we will “evolve our norms as to what is expected”.

In other words, as things become impossible to hide the half-life of embarrassing disclosures may change.

“If someone does something stupid as a teenager, does that have to damage their career forever?

“Not necessarily. Would you hire somebody who didn’t behave properly but now they are 10 years older? You might very well say, ‘Yes I remember that, but I did that too’.”

A cameraman is filming our discussion with a souped-up iPhone with a bolted on wide lens and broadcast-quality microphone.

Crocker has not seen such a system before and his fascination with the technology is evident.

He is one of the people who shaped and articulated the norms of a generation of engineers, values of openness, humility, and trying to get things done under adverse circumstances.


Big changes
These days, computer science has become a commercial rather than an academic vocation, so is he concerned that the architects of the coming decades will lose these values? His answer is surprising. "The internet is not going to be the story forever."

He sees other big changes afoot: experimental bioengineering, environmental deterioration and the prospect that the nation-state system is coming to an end. With such changes unfolding, the finest minds of the future may not be occupied by computer science.

“The environment in which the internet was built reflected a particular time,” Crocker says. “Everything has a time and that doesn’t last forever.”