Stephen Crocker

Inventor of Requests for Comments

• Born: October 15, 1944
• Place of Birth: Pasadena, California

Primary Company/Organization: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Introduction

Since the 1960s, Steve Crocker has been involved with nearly every major American body overseeing the Internet, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, and the Internet Society. In 2012 he was chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). One of the fathers of the Internet, he has received awards for his early work on the general architecture of the Internet, development of the community that has continued to work on networks, and the Request for Comments series, which he assumed was merely a temporary series of notes.

Early Life

Steve Crocker was born on October 15, 1944, in Pasadena, California, and grew up mainly in Los Angeles. He had some experience with computers while in high school, and after graduating in 1961, he got a job programming computers. Crocker attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), earning his bachelor's degree with a concentration in mathematics (1968) and his doctoral degree with a concentration in computer science (1977).

Throughout college, Crocker devoted considerable time to programming for both work and fun. While a graduate student, he worked on the team that developed the protocols used by ARPANET, the network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense that evolved into today's Internet. His most significant contribution was the requests for comments (RFCs) that helped shaped the network. Crocker was part of the small group of UCLA researchers who attempted to send the first message between nodes on the ARPANET on October 29, 1969. They were trying to send a message from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute. The system famously crashed. He also taught a computer programming course for the IBM 7094 mainframe computer that was offered to high school teachers and students. The class was an effort to accelerate the spread of computer programming education at the high school level.

In the 1960s, Crocker attended graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a brief period, working on a chess program in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, before transferring back to UCLA to finish his Ph.D.

Life's Work

Crocker remained intimately involved with the formation and development of the Internet after graduate school. He was a program manager at ARPA and involved in the creation of its Network Working Group, the forerunner of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which develops Internet standards. He was also a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which oversees the development of the Internet, and the Internet Society (ISOC), the international nonprofit organization that oversees Internet standards and policy. Today ISOC copyrights all IETF requests for comments.

One of Crocker's most important contributions was the invention of the Request for Comments series (RFCs), in 1969. RFCs are memoranda drafted by computer scientists as published discourse on matters pertaining to the Internet—especially research, methods, etiquette, and other issues (Crocker notes that RFCs are the source of the Internet's rules, formal and unwritten). Those adopted by the IETF become Internet standards. Crocker wrote the first RFCs to keep track of and circulate notes on ARPANET as it was developed. At the time of RFC 1, ARPANET consisted of a network of four computers: at UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah at Salt Lake City. Graduate students from all four institutes—the Network Working Group—had been meeting informally when possible, in order to discuss ARPANET issues and what could be done with the network. In 1969, they decided to begin writing down notes from their discussions, in order to circulate them for comment from other interested parties, and Crocker drafted the first such document. The first RFC had to be photocopied and circulated by mail; later RFCs were, of course, posted to the Internet.

RFCs serve many purposes. They preserve knowledge, they open discussions, and they explain and define the workings of the Internet, both technical and cultural; a great education can be yielded by reading the RFCs, imparting most if not all of the same information as a college course. Modern RFCs are rarely actual requests for comments and must be vetted before publication. They are preceded by working documents called Internet Drafts (I-Ds), which are works in progress published by the IETF; I-Ds in some ways are the actual successors to the original RFCs, as they are written in a less formal style. They are considered inherently obsolete after six months and are not intended to be used as reference documents. RFCs are held to a higher standard.

In 2007, the IETF defined streams (categories) of RFCs, with different editors responsible for each. These streams have since been refined, with specific standards defined for each, and include an IETF stream of RFCs from within the IETF or sponsored by an IETF area director; the IAB's stream; the stream of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF); and the Independent Submission stream. These streams were defined in RFC 4844.

Each RFC is designated a number, which never changes, and a status indicating its relevance to Internet standards: informational, experimental (generally for proposals that, if they work or are adopted, are promoted to the “standards track” status), best current practice (consisting of official rules, with a fuzzy line dividing it from the standards track), standards track (RFCs intended to become Internet standards), historic (documents no longer relevant to the current Internet because of obsolescence or other factors), and unknown (which applies only to some old RFCs). There are a great many terms with official meaning to RFCs, defined in previous RFCs.

As serious and formal as the RFC process is compared to the days of the Network Working Group, it retains one exception from those days: the April Fools RFC, a humorous RFC issued on most April Fools Days. The grandfather of the April Fools' Day RFCs is RFC 527—from June, not April, 1973—which parodied Lewis Carroll's poem “Jabberwocky” with “ARPAWOCKY.” Other April Fools' Day RFCs have described a protocol for using homing pigeons to transmit IP packets, an analysis of the infinite monkey theorem, the use of semaphore signaling to transmit IP data, and other particularly jokes best appreciated by engineers.

In 1994, Crocker cofounded CyberCash, Inc., and served as its chief technology officer. CyberCash was an online payment system for e-commerce, developing electronic wallet software and credit card payment processing software. CyberCash was one of the victims of the Y2K (millennial) bug—problems occasioned by format for dates used by many computers and software prior to the twenty-first century, which were often based on only a two-digit place for the year—which resulted in credit card payments being recorded twice in their system. It filed for bankruptcy a year later and was acquired by Verisign, which in 2005 was acquired by PayPal, now the leading online payment system.

Crocker later founded the DSL-based ISP Executive DSL (1998) and Longitude Systems (1999). In 2002, he cofounded Shinkuro, from the Japanese word for “synchronize,” with Jeffrey Kay. A private company based in Washington, D.C., Shinkuro is a research and development company focused on information sharing and developing file-sharing software. Crocker serves as the company's CEO.

Crocker chaired ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee from its inception in 2002 until 2010. In 2011, he was elected Chairman of the ICANN board. He was Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Internet Award in 2002, and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012. In the 2020s, he served as president of Edgemoor Research Institute, an organization that researches Internet registration systems.

Personal Life

Howard Sobel, Crocker's stepfather, introduced him to sailing, and Crocker enjoyed it so much that he quickly bought his own boat. His brother David, who has been involved with Internet issues since the Internet's inception, is perhaps best known for his work standardizing e-mail. In 2012, Crocker remained active in Internet issues. He and his wife, Beth, have two children, Melissa and Andrew.

Bibliography

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge: MIT, 2000. Print.

“Comments on the Introduction of Accountable Measures Regarding Access to Personal Information of .us Registrations.” National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 2023, www.ntia.doc.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ntia-2023-0006-0008‗edgemoor-research-institute.pdf. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.

Crocker, Stephen. “Oral History Interview with Stephen Crocker.” 24 Oct. 1991. Charles Babbage Institute. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.

Hafner, Katie. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon, 1998. Print.

Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Vintage, 2011. Print.