Asked about the culture behind RFCs, the internet's engineering documents, Mockapetris recalls that early on he simply wrote them and his boss handed out the numbers. Process and politics came later, with the standards body that now claims his invention.
…of some supposed stories about.nu and so forth, but this kind of happened. Okay. So do you know why Anguilla is very lucky?ai.ai, right? You know, Columbia.co. Can't get a.com. Well, you can get a.co. It's close. So, you know, this is another one of these ownership of the namespace and so forth.
When I was reading about, I guess, some of the history of this work, there's all these RFCs. And my high-level understanding is that's a name for an engineering proposal. But I'm curious to know what's the culture behind an RFC.
Well, that's evolved over time. In the good old days, people would, you know, I would write this RFC, for example. There's a two beginning RFCs for the DNS. So I wrote them. And my boss happened to be the guy that hands out the RFC numbers. So he would give me a number and then he would publish it. And that just meant putting it on a server somewhere and people will come along and pluck these RFCs down. In time, though, people started having meetings and organizing the IETF. And so now we have a bunch of processes and we have different kinds of RFCs. Some are just informational. You can write an article and this is what I think. And if it's like reasonably cogent, you know, you can probably get an RFC number for it. And, you know. But then there's standards track stuff that are going to be internet, they're going to be standards. And they're, you know, politics and paperwork. You know, there's a whole lot of process. You know, the IET, the IETF takes credit for DNS. Okay. Now…
Today, computers are ubiquitous and it's being talked about on social media all the time. But back then, I think it was a lot more niche. So, how did you get into computing?
MIT was offering some summer classes for high school students, and I just took one and I was kind of fascinated. But I was a physics major. I was, I was, you know, physics won World War II, and it was just cool and, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? So I got to MIT. I was a physics major. You…
When you're working on DNS and you're seeing the internet growing, did you ever think it would grow as big as it is today? Or I'm kind of curious to view it from the lens of like, right now, if you look at the headlines, it's AI is kind of exploding and it's, you know, this future thing. And at the…
