The first Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting was held in 1986.
More precisely, IETF 1 took place on January 16–17, 1986, at Linkabit in San Diego, California. It was a small gathering of 21 people, a striking contrast with modern IETF meetings, which routinely attract participants from around the world.
The early IETF was created as a forum for technical coordination among researchers and contractors working on networks funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Its work involved the ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and the emerging Internet gateway system. The organization’s role later expanded into the open, international standards community that develops and documents Internet protocols.
The first meeting was not yet the large standards conference many people picture today. Non-government equipment vendors first attended the fourth meeting, in October 1986, and working groups were introduced at the fifth meeting in February 1987. The IETF’s first meeting therefore belongs to the formative period when Internet engineering was still a relatively small research activity.