Arpanet

The Network Working Group's development of open technical documentation - the RFC - was a necessary step to technical advancement. Steve Crocker explains the importance of openness in a developmental situation:

"The environment we were operating in was one of open research. The only payoff available was to have good work recognized and used. Software was generally considered free. Openness wasn't an option; it just was." (Crocker, 1993c)

The NWG's work was important (THE?) to the development of the ARPANET. Their work paved the way for the development of TCP/IP, when more capacity was needed and other problems arose.

I would call the RFC one of the Heralding Achievements of the NWG. It represents the forward looking view which these people had and it proved to succeed. The principles which embody RFC 3 foreshadowed the success of TCP/IP from NCP's influence. Both TCP/IP and NCP were developed in the field. A version of the protocols would be released for experimentation and use. Also all specifications were available free and easily available for people to examine and make comments about. Only through this early release were the problems and kinks found and worked out in a timely manner. This bottom-up approach is substantially different than the top-down approach which other protocol suites have been developed under. The top-down idea comes from figuring everything out as a standard on paper, or behind closed doors and then releasing it to be used. The bottom-up (and free accessibility of protocol documentation and specifications) model allows for a wide-range of people and experiences to join in and perfect the protocol and make it the best possible. (Check email in TCPIP.MAIL file to provide quotes.)

In summing up the achievements of the process that developed the ARPANET, the ARPANET Completion Report draft explains:

"The ARPANET development was an extremely intense activity in which contributions were made by many of the best computer scientists in the United States. Thus, almost all of the "major technical problems" already mentioned received continuing attention and the detailed approach to those problems changed" [II-24]

The computer scientists and others involved were encouraged in their work by the ARPA philosophy of gathering the best computer scientists working in