ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is really a question for the Internet History list, I think http://www.postel.org/internet-history/ I don't know how things were done in the 1970s, except that the NIC used Englebart's NLS. I get the impression that the earliest RFCs were formatted using the facilities at the author's home institution; I don't know about the mechanics of duplication and distribution, but it relied on paper mail for some years until the NIC spun up an FTP server, e.g. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc95 For a very long time, RFCs and drafts were produced using nroff. You can see some of the remnants of that here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/tools/ For about 20 years there has been an XML source format for RFCs https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2629 But in the final stages the RFC Editor would convert to nroff to produce the final published form. They have just this week switched to a toolchain based on v3 of the xml2rfc source format. I believe they aren't using nroff for the text format any more, the publishing tool produces it directly. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/rfc-interest/jemoHh4imSYkX_Oo2FvMyt_7… Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ defend the right to speak, write, worship, associate, and vote freely