After
DARPA began the Internet program in earnest in 1977, the project members were in need of communication and documentation of their work in order to realize the concepts laid out by
Bob Kahn and
Vint Cerf some years before. The
Request for Comments (RFC) series was considered the province of the
ARPANET project and the Network Working Group (NWG) which defined the
network protocols used on it. Thus, the members of the Internet project decided on publishing their own series of documents,
Internet Experiment Notes, which were modeled after the RFCs.
Jon Postel became the editor of the new series, in addition to his existing role of administering the long-standing RFC series. Between March 1977 and September 1982, 206 IENs were published. After that, with the plan to terminate support of the
Network Control Protocol (NCP) on the ARPANET and switch to
TCP/IP, the production of IENs was discontinued, and all further publication was conducted within the existing RFC system. The "Final Report" of the "TCP Project", mentions some of the people involved, including groups from Stanford University, University College London, USC-ISI, MIT, BBN, NDRE, among others. Key networking principles, such as the
robustness principle, were defined during the IEN work. == See also ==