Protocol Timeline

First packet-switched network. 4-node network between UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and University of Utah.

RFC 114. File Transfer Protocol – one of the oldest still-in-use application protocols.

RFC 318. Remote terminal access. Unencrypted predecessor to SSH.

Cerf and Kahn publish 'A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection'. Foundation of the modern internet.

RFC 768. User Datagram Protocol. Minimal connectionless transport for speed over reliability.

RFC 791 (IP) and RFC 793 (TCP) standardized. The internet's core protocols.

RFC 792. Internet Control Message Protocol. Powers ping and traceroute.

RFC 821. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Email transmission standard.

RFC 882/883. Domain Name System replaces HOSTS.TXT. Hierarchical naming for the internet.

RFC 951 (BOOTP), later RFC 2131 (DHCP). Automatic IP address assignment.

RFC 958. Network Time Protocol. Clock synchronization across networks.

RFC 1067. Simple Network Management Protocol. Network device monitoring.

RFC 1105. Border Gateway Protocol. Inter-AS routing – makes the internet route traffic between providers.

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Single-line GET request, HTML response. The web begins.

Netscape's SSL and Ylönen's SSH-1. The beginning of encrypted internet communication.

RFC 1945. Headers, status codes, multiple content types. The web becomes practical.

RFC 2068 (later 2616). Persistent connections, chunked transfer, virtual hosting.

RFC 2460. 128-bit addresses to solve IPv4 exhaustion. Full adoption still in progress.

RFC 2246. First TLS version, replacing SSL. Encrypted internet begins to scale.

RFC 3315. DHCP for IPv6 networks.

RFC 4251. Secure Shell v2 standardized. Replaced broken SSH-1.

RFC 5246. SHA-256, authenticated encryption (GCM), flexible cipher suites.

RFC 5905. IPv6 support, improved security (Autokey).

Google deploys experimental QUIC protocol across its services. IETF standardization process begins.

RFC 7540 (later RFC 9113). Binary framing, multiplexing, header compression. Major web performance leap.

RFC 7858. Encrypted DNS queries to prevent surveillance.

RFC 8446. 1-RTT handshake, 0-RTT resumption. Removed all weak algorithms.

RFC 8484. DNS privacy via HTTPS. Deployed by Chrome, Firefox, Cloudflare.

RFC 9000. IETF standardized QUIC – built-in TLS, multiplexed streams, 0-RTT.

RFC 9114. HTTP over QUIC. Eliminates TCP head-of-line blocking.

Model Context Protocol (Anthropic). Open standard for AI agents to access tools, data sources, and system context via JSON-RPC over stdio/HTTP.

CNCF graduates OpenTelemetry. Unified observability protocol for traces, metrics, and logs. Replaces Jaeger/Zipkin/StatsD fragmentation.

Agent-to-Agent Protocol (Google). Emerging standard for AI agents to discover capabilities and communicate with each other via JSON-RPC.

ECH (formerly ESNI). Encrypts the SNI field in TLS ClientHello, hiding which site a user visits from network observers. Deployed by Cloudflare.

RFC 9369. Updated QUIC with new packet protection to defeat ossification by middleboxes that learned to inspect QUIC v1 headers.

HTTP/3 crosses 30% of global web traffic (Cloudflare Radar). Alt-Svc adoption drives transparent upgrade from HTTP/2 on supporting networks.

W3C WebTransport API reaches general availability. Bidirectional streams over HTTP/3 QUIC – replacement for WebSocket without TCP head-of-line blocking.

Apache Iceberg REST Catalog specification v1. Universal metadata API for lakehouse interoperability across Databricks, Snowflake, Trino, Athena.

HTTP 402 Payment Required gets real implementation. Micropayment protocol for AI agents to pay for API access via stablecoins on Coinbase/Stripe.