Most RFCs define wire formats, state machines, or cryptographic primitives. RFC 1855 defines manners. Published in October 1995 by Sally Hambridge of Intel on behalf of the IETF's Responsible Use of the Network (RUN) Working Group, it is the canonical attempt to codify what we now call netiquette: the social protocol layer riding on top of SMTP, NNTP, and IRC.

It exists because 1995 was an inflection point. The September that never ended was in full swing — AOL had opened Usenet to its members in 1993, the web was exploding, and millions of newcomers were arriving on networks whose norms had been shaped by a small, mostly academic culture. Sysadmins were drowning in complaints about flame wars, chain letters, and people typing in ALL CAPS. Hambridge's RFC was meant as a document organizations could hand to new users — a kind of operational README for being on the internet.

The document is organized in three parts: one-to-one communication (email, talk), one-to-many communication (mailing lists, Usenet), and information services (FTP, gopher, WWW, MUDs). Each section splits guidance into User Guidelines and Administrator Guidelines, which is unusually thoughtful — it acknowledges that civility is partly an infrastructure problem.

Some specifics that feel oddly modern:

• "Wait overnight to send emotional responses." The original cooling-off rule, pre-dating every "draft folder" pop psychology article by decades.
• Keep line length under 65 characters and end with a CR. A reminder that we used to compose with the recipient's terminal width in mind.
• "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive." Hambridge quotes Postel's Law directly — applying a TCP design principle to human conversation.
• Don't send chain letters; they are forbidden on the Internet. A surprisingly hard rule, backed by the threat of losing network access.
• Signature files should be under four lines. The original anti-bloat guideline.
• Assume archiving. "Email can be forwarded… messages you send can be saved." A 1995 warning that aged remarkably well into the era of screenshots and discovery.

The RFC is also a time capsule. It warns about the cost of international bandwidth, advises checking .plan files via finger, and explains that MUDs are "virtual reality electronic meeting places." It assumes you might be paying per-minute for your connection and gives the etiquette of talk(1) sessions a full subsection.

What makes RFC 1855 quietly important is its framing. By publishing social norms as an RFC — with the same numbering, format, and IETF imprimatur as RFC 791 or RFC 821 — Hambridge asserted that human behavior is part of the protocol stack. The document is informational, not a standard, and it explicitly says local culture varies and that this is a "minimum set" of guidelines. But the act of writing it down gave administrators something to point at, and gave a generation of new users a shared vocabulary.

It has never been formally updated. Every modern community guidelines document — from Stack Overflow's code of conduct to Mastodon instance rules to corporate Slack etiquette pages — is in some sense a fork of RFC 1855. The terminology has evolved (we say "don't feed the trolls" instead of "ignore flame bait") but the underlying observation holds: networks need social protocols, and someone has to write them down.