The whole works actually started considerably earlier than that; the roots go back to 1972, with the formation of the International Packet Network Working Group - although that group went defunct before TCP/IP itself was developed under DARPA's lead. I don't recall the early history well, in detail - there's a long draft article by Ronda Hauben which goes into it in detail, and there's also "INWG and the Conception of the Internet: An Eyewitness Account" by Alexander McKenzie which covers it too. By 1977 the DARPA-led effort had produced several working prototype implementations, and TCP/IP (originally there was only TCP, without a separate data packet carriage layer) were up to version 3. Yes and no. The earliest distribution mechanism (for the initial NCP/ARPANet work) was hardcopy (you can't distribute things over the 'net before you have it working :-), and in fact until a recent effort to put them all online, not all RFC's were available in machine-readable form. (I think some IEN's still aren't.) So for many of them, if you wanted a copy, you had to have someone at ISI make a photocopy (although I think they stocked them early on) and physically mail it to you! I honestly don't recall when that happened; it does seem obvious in retrospect! Most of us were creating document in online text systems, and it would have been trivial to make them available in machine-readable form. Old habits die hard, I guess... :-) Yes, good idea. Depends. Yes, the service provided to the _clients_ was very similar (which can be seen in how similar the NCP and TCP versions of thing like TELNET, FTP, etc were), but internally, they are very different. Yes, that's pretty accurate (but it does mean that there are _a lot_ of differences internally - re-transmissions, etc). One other important difference is that there's no flow control in the underlying network (something that took years to understand and deal with properly). TCP/IP was the product of a large, well-organized, DARPA-funded and -led effort which involved industry, academic and government players (the first two, for the most part, DARPA-funded). So I wouldn't really call it an 'academic' project. Noel