How the Internet Got Its Rules

I came across this piece in the Op Ed section of the New York Times on the 40th anniversary of RFCs (Request for Comment). It's a delightful piece, authored by one of the early pioneers and a contributor to RFC 1. This intro should whet your appetite and convince you to read on by clicking the linked article from the title above.

When the R.F.C.’s were born, there wasn’t a World Wide Web. Even by the end of 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking four computers at four research centers: the University of California, Los Angeles; the Stanford Research Institute; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The government financed the network and the hundred or fewer computer scientists who used it. It was such a small community that we all got to know one another.