Date: 2021may9 Q. Seminal RFCs A. These are the earliest RFCs for these subjects. The first RFCs are smaller and more fun to read. There are links to the latest updates. File Transfer Protocol -- FTP https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc765 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol -- SMTP By John Postel (what an appropriate last name) https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc821 Mail format https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc822 Domain Names -- DNS https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt Finger Protocol Not used any more, but an example of clean RFC https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1288 Uniform Resource Locators -- URL https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1738 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 Of course, Tim Berners-Lee is one of the authors https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2068 Secure Socket Layer -- SSL 3.0 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6101 Delay-Tolerant Networking Architecture -- Interplanetary https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4838 FUN A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149 Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 Postel's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle