The first meeting of the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, took place. While not many people know about the IETF anymore, this is a very important body as it not only develops and promotes voluntary Internet standards, but it developed and promoted the standards that effectively created the internet, including the internet protocol suite and the TCP/IP stack.

While it started out with support from the U.S. federal government, it has operated as a standards development organization under the guidance of the non-profit Internet Society. While development of new standards are slow, as it uses a rough consensus guidelines and has to interact with a number of other global organizations and standards bodies, it continues to make progress and is a leading force behind IPv6, which is desperately needed if organizations continue to insist we need an “internet of things” on the global “cloud”. (We don’t, but you can’t stop the marketing madmen.)

The internet that we depend upon daily didn’t just happen by magic, it took the hard work and dedication of a number of organizations. The IETF was one of these organizations, and the internet might not have happened without it.