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Steve Crocker, the man who invented the RFCs -- the documentation for the internet. Image: ICANN

Steve Crocker was there when the internet was born. The date was Oct. 29, 1969, and the place was the University of California, Los Angeles. Crocker was among a small group of UCLA researchers who sent the first message between the first two nodes of the ARPAnet, the U.S. Department of Defensefunded network that eventually morphed into the modern internet.

Crockers biggest contribution to the project was the creation of the Request for Comments, or RFC. Shared among the various research institutions building the ARPAnet, these were documents that sought to describe how this massive network would work, and they were essential to its evolution so essential, theyre still used today.

Like the RFCs, Crocker is still a vital part of the modern internet. Hes the chairman of the board of ICANN, the organization which operates the internets domain naming system, following in the footsteps of his old high school and UCLA buddy Vint Cerf. And like Cerf, Crocker is part of the inaugural class inducted into the Internet Societys (ISOC) Hall of Fame.

This week, he spoke with Wired about the first internet transmission, the creation of the RFCs, and their place in history. RFC is now included in the Oxford English Dictionary. And so is Steve Crocker.

Wired: Some say the internet was born on Oct. 29, 1969, when the first message was sent between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). But others say it actually arrived a few weeks earlier, when UCLA set up its ARPAnet machines. You were there. Which is it?

Steve Crocker: October. The very first attempt to get some communication between our machine, a Sigma 7, and [Douglas] Engelbarts machine, an SDS-940, at SRI.

Famously, it crashed.

We tried to log in [to the SRI machine]. We had a very simple terminal protocol so that you could act like you were a terminal at our end and log in to their machine. But the software had a small bug in it. We sent the l and the o, but the g caused a crash.

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Meet the Man Who Invented the Instructions for the Internet