Here on Hacker News some time ago (like years ago) I saw a link to criticism of something that became an Internet standard, the format of the link was either text or a picture of text. It was a very long time ago, like 60s or 70s. It was a formal, and negative, review. Among the criticisms was that it wasn't considered that novel.

As I remember it, this was at Bell Labs and the protocol later became TCP/IP, but I might be filling in the blanks in my memory incorrectly.

What I'm sure of is that it was critical, at a research lab of some kind, included the statement that the proposal wasn't novel (others did similar things etc), and I recall that the author went on to create an Internet standard out of it later, such as TCP/IP or something similarly important.

Thanks for helping me track down this link.