An Internet Experiment Note (IEN) is a sequentially numbered document in a series of technical publications issued by the participants of the early development work groups that created the precursors of the modern

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. After

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

began the Internet program in earnest in 1977, the project members were in need of communication and documentation of their work in order to realize the concepts laid out by

Bob Kahn Robert Elliot Kahn (born December 23, 1938) is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the hea ...

and

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include t ...

some years before. The

Request for Comments A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or g ...

(RFC) series was considered the province of the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

project and the Network Working Group (NWG) which defined the

network protocols A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

used on it. Thus, the members of the Internet project decided on publishing their own series of documents, ''Internet Experiment Notes'', which were modeled after the RFCs.

Jon Postel Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for be ...

became the editor of the new series, in addition to his existing role of administering the long-standing RFC series. Between March, 1977, and September, 1982, 206 IENs were published. After that, with the plan to terminate support of the Network Control Protocol (NCP) on the ARPANET and switch to

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

, the production of IENs was discontinued, and all further publication was conducted within the existing RFC system.

External links

Internet Experiment Notes index at postel.org

IEN archive at postel.org
(plain text)
IEN archive at postel.org
(PDF)

{{network-stub History of the Internet Internet Standards