The publication of the first “request for comments,” or RFC, documents paves the way for the birth of the internet.
April 7 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology. RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to kick around new ideas in a public forum; sometimes, these ideas are adopted as new standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
When it comes to the actual birth of the Internet, January 1st, 1983, the National Science Foundation’s university network backbone (a precursor to the World Wide Web) became operational.1
