On April 7, 2009 it was 40 years ago since the first RFC (Request For Comments) was published in 1969 by Steve Crocker at University of California, Los Angeles. The RFC is the reason why the internet works as it does today and to many internet seem chaotic and dangerously out of control. But in reality it’s exactly the opposite and without the RFCs internet would have been very different than it is today, may not have existed at all. We will never know.

I find it fascinating with people like Steve Crooker and many others that have worked on this subject that they do this because they believe in it and not how to get something out of it as it is of many parts of corners of today’s internet.  However, we should not forget the great things people like Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have done for operative system side which have brought many people together, for good and bad, to bring the internet and computer life forward.

RFC bring forward and create our standards that as a web developer and web designer is a must if we don’t want a chaotic internet life in the future. Unfortunately, when it comes to web browsers it’s been chaotic for a few years now because of the dominating role Internet Explorer have had and lack of interest from Microsoft to follow open standards. This is of course another discussion but it’s definitely going in a positive direction with Internet Explorer 8, plus that many other browsers like Opera, Mozilla that value open standards.

Steve Crocker writes the following on IMP Software, you can read the complete RFC here.

The software for the ARPA Network exists partly in the IMPs and partly in the respective HOSTs. BB&N has specified the software of the IMPs and it is the responsibility of the HOST groups to agree on HOST software.

During the summer of 1968, representatives from the initial four sites met several times to discuss the HOST software and initial experiments on the network. There emerged from these meetings a working group of three, Steve Carr from Utah, Jeff Rulifson from SRI, and Steve Crocker of UCLA, who met during the fall and winter. The
most recent meeting was in the last week of March in Utah. Also present was Bill Duvall of SRI who has recently started working with Jeff Rulifson.

Somewhat independently, Gerard DeLoche of UCLA has been working on the HOST-IMP interface.

I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected.

For further reading, New York Times wrote a nice article about the first RFC.

Today Opera 9.60 was released with some new nice features such as Feed Preview that allows you to preview a feed before subscribing. And then we got Low bandwidth mode for mail which I assume it designed for people with slow connections.

Also introducing Opera Scroll Marker which is intended to make it easier to read a page when scrolling.

The new Opera Scroll Marker makes it easier to continue reading when you scroll through a Web page. At the end of the page it will indicate the previous position of the bottom of the screen so you can easily see where to continue reading.

I really like the idea about the scroll marker, however it would be nice if you could set the marker position yourself with the possibility of remembering the marker position next time you open the page. As it is now, I don’t find much use for this feature so hopefully it will be improved in coming releases.

See the changelog or why not download Opera and try it yourself :) They have also launched a new site today - Discover Opera. This site will help you to find the powerful features of the Opera browser. Great for new users!