Internet Experiment Note

Internet Experiment Notes (IENs) were a series of technical notes created in the early days of the Internet, during the early development of the TCP/IP protocol suite.

After DARPA began the Internet program in earnest in 1977, in order to realize the concepts laid out by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf some years before, the project members decided they needed a document series. Since Requests for Comments (RFCs) were considered the province of the ARPANET project, and the Network Working Group (NWG) which defined the network protocols used on it, the members of the Internet project decided to create their own separate series of documents, which were to be much like the RFC's.

Thus were the Internet Experiment Notes born. Jon Postel became the editor for the new series, in addition to his existing role handling the long-standing RFC series. Between March, 1977, and September, 1982, 206 IENs were published. After that, with the plan to shut down NCP on the ARPANET and switch to TCP/IP, IENs were discontinued, and all further documents were published as part of the existing RFC series.

External links

* [http://www.postel.org/ien/txt/ Internet Experiment Notes] (plain text)
* [http://www.postel.org/ien/pdf/ Internet Experiment Notes] (PDFs)