NW 209 - TCP/IP
1969 ARPANET began
1972 Telnet* RFC
1973 FTP* RFC
1974 TCP* RFC
1981 DNS* RFC
*Note that the links I've provided are to the most up-to-date standards of these protocols. You will notice a date discrepancy between these and their corresponding RFCs that were introduced in the years mentioned.
Here's a good timeline of the Internet's History, published on one of the Internet Society's servers: http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
A good narrative of the Internet's History can be found here: Short History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling
The Internet Society has broad control over the governing and operations of the Internet.
To quote the ISOC itself from http://www.isoc.org/isoc:
The Internet SOCiety (ISOC) is a professional membership society with more than 150 organizational and 6,000 individual members in over 100 countries. It provides leadership in addressing issues that confront the future of the Internet, and is the organization home for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).
The Society's individual and organizational members are bound by a common stake in maintaining the viability and global scaling of the Internet. They comprise the companies, government agencies, and foundations that have created the Internet and its technologies as well as innovative new entrepreneurial organizations contributing to maintain that dynamic. Visit their home pages to see how Internet innovators are creatively using the network.
The Society is governed by its Board of Trustees elected by its membership around the world.
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) acts as the technical advisor to the ISOC. The IETF, IRTF, and the IANA fall under the auspices of the IAB.
Some responsibilities of the IAB include:
The IETF is where most of the work relating to the standards process goes on. It is divided into 8 Functional Areas along broad lines:
Each Functional Area, in turn, is divided into smaller Working Groups (WG). For example, the Security Area is divided into Working Groups that include Kerberos, IP Security Policy, IP Security Protocol, Secure Shell, and others.
Each Functional Area is headed by an Area Director. The eight Area Directors, plus the chair of the IETF/IESG form the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).
Members of the IETF can be nominated to become one of the thirteen (13) voting members of the IAB.
Email is the the main method of communication among Working Group members.
The IRTF's goal is to "...promote research of importance to the evolution of the future Internet by creating focused, long-term and small Research Groups working on topics related to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology."
RFCs are documents that describe a protocol, application, service, etc. related to the Internet. These documents come in two main varieties: standards (STD) and informational (INFO).
Documents submitted to the standards track go through three levels of maturity: