365 RFCs

Commenting on one RFC a day in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first RFC.

by Darius Kazemi, September 2 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Hotel block

RFC-245 is titled “Reservations for Network Working Group Meeting”. It's authored by Carol Falls of MIT's Project MAC and dated October 5, 1971.

The technical content

This is a coordinating message from Project MAC, who will be hosting the upcoming Network Working Group meeting over four days in October. There has been a room block booked the attendees with a guaranteed rate.

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You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, September 1 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Not issued

RFC-244 was never issued.

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You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, August 31 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

A bibliography from IBM

RFC-243 is titled “Network and Data Sharing Bibliography”. It's authored by Alvin P. Mullery of IBM and dated October 5, 1971.

The technical content

One of the purposes of the Request For Comments series is for researchers to share bibliographies with one another. That is, to let other researchers know about interesting papers that you've read recently and to help everyone in the community keep on top of the state of the art.

This bibliography contains papers in the following categories:

  • general data structures
  • data description
  • data conversion
  • data management
  • data security
  • data transmission
  • network design

Analysis

The “network design” section is dominated by ARPANET or ARPANET-adjacent authors. The other sections have far less overlap with the NWG community!

Most papers are from 1968-1971. One standout is the only paper in the “data security” section, which is volume 9 of Paul Baran's RAND-published classic, “On Distributed Communication”. You can read about the historical important of this series of papers and you can download all the volumes from there, including volume 9.

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You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, August 30 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

A proposal from IBM

RFC-242 is titled “Data Descriptive Language for Shared Data”. It's authored by Lois Haibt and Alvin P. Mullery of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

The technical content

This is a paper about shared data on the network, and it's in the context of the IBM experimental project Network/440, which is the topic of RFC-187.

The authors divide data representation problems into three categories:

  1. bit-level representation and encodings
  2. representation of collections of data
  3. representation of high-level structures like indexes, cross-references, and so on

IBM's developed a “descriptive language” for representing these kinds of data problems. They claim that their language simplifies programming when compared to the RAND Form Machine.

Their system not only describes data types (like floating point, string, boolean) but also groupings of data into tree-like structures, and tagging of data with arbitrary properties over arbitrary fields. So a chunk of data may have properties that overlap with other ranges of the data.

Analysis

This language seems more complex than the RAND Form Machine, and is coming coming outside of the established NWG community. IBM, for being a gigantic computer and software company, hasn't attended many NWG meetings to date and I think their proposals suffer for it. While the Network Working Group is open to all, it seems like you can't just lob proposals over the wall and expect people to adopt them or even read them if you haven't first made some human connections.

Looking forward in the record, this RFC doesn't seem to make much impact on the NWG community.

Further reading

Lois Haibt began working at IBM in 1955 and was the only woman on the FORTRAN team at IBM in the 1970s. There is a brief biography and a very long interview with her at the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

I couldn't find much on Alvin Mullery, but I liked this note he wrote to his alumni magazine at Brown University chastising them for calling the 1970s the “prehistoric” age of computing.

How to follow this blog

You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, August 29 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Use a computer at your own risk

RFC-241 is titled “Connecting Computers to MLC Ports”. It's authored by Alex McKenzie of BBN and dated September 29, 1971.

The technical content

Apparently BBN gets asked a lot if people can connect a computer to a Terminal IMP (TIP) rather than a connecting a terminal to a Terminal IMP. Because the TIP has no error correction built in, BBN strongly recommends not doing this. It's one thing when there's a human in the middle, slowly typing, who can check every transmission for an error. That's in fact what the TIP was designed for. But once you have computers talking to computers, errors can quickly compound, and thus error correction is needed! (I talk about this in my post about RFC-230, and I suspect that this RFC is a reply to RFC-230 without naming it explicitly.)

The RFC closes by saying, essentially: connect a computer up to a TIP at your own risk. Interestingly they also note that “we would be extremely interested in hearing about actual experience with this type of network connection”. They just doubt anything of use will come of it.

Analysis

Amusingly this RFC's header lists obsoleted documents as “Our Previous Verbal Comments”.

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You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, August 28 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Corrected statistics

RFC-240 is titled “Site Status”. It's authored by Alex McKenzie of BBN and dated September 30, 1971.

The technical content

McKenzie is issuing a correction to RFC-235, which published statistics about the the various sites around the network. He apologizes profusely in the opening for “any embarassment this may have caused to anyone associated with the Network”.

The new aggregate stats are, by my count:

  • 57 dead (+1 from prior)
  • 34 open (+1 from prior)
  • 16 timed out (-1 from prior)
  • 9 half open (-1 from prior)
  • 4 refused

Analysis

These stats are really not very different from the ones reported in RFC-235! Specifically the discrepancies are:

  • BBN was fully open rather than half open for one test
  • MIT(DM) is dead at one point rather than half open

I'm not sure why McKenzie's apologies are so profuse!

How to follow this blog

You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, August 27 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Combative about naming

RFC-239 is titled “Host Mnemonics Proposed in RFC #226”. It's authored by Bob Braden of UCLA and dated September 23, 1971.

The technical content

Well, we're back to the host name debate again. There have been enough of these that the RFC begins with a rare note inserted by the Network Information Center pointing the reader to previous correspondence on the issue! Host names are the subject of the following RFCs:

This RFC is a note that was not intended to be an RFC, sent from Bob Braden to Peggy Karp of MITRE. The NIC decided this was important enough to assign it an RFC number.

Braden's issue with Karp's list is that the mnemonics chosen are “historical accidents” that are “systems programmers' midnight decisions” that were made with little care. Braden suggests using the names that the NIC has been using, since they are the closest thing to a centralized authority on the ARPANET.

He also says that UCLA objects to the mnemonics that Karp suggests for their computers. Karp assigns “UCLA” to the Sigma 7 host and “UCLA36” to their IBM 360 Model 91. Braden suggests they be named “UCLAS7” and “UCLA91”.

Braden also thinks “SRIARC” should be known as “SRINIC” since “everybody calls it the NIC”.

Analysis

This is a lot more combatively written than your standard RFC, I think because it was intended as private correspondence and then promoted to RFC status. Presumably this was done with Braden's consent.

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You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, August 26 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Encouraging explanations

RFC-238 is titled “Comments on DTP and FTP Proposals”. It's authored by Bob Braden of UCLA and dated September 29, 1971.

The technical content

Finally, an RFC that isn't about host names! The author is providing his comments on RFC-171 and RFC-172, which describe the Data Transfer Protocol and the File Transfer Protocol, respectively.

He says that there is some key information missing from what is essentially a record separator field: the separator should contain a sequence number itself so that the receiver can be sure that they have received all data circumscribed by the separator.

According to RFC-171, the first thing that happens after the initial connection is a handshake where both parties figure out which DTP modes they have available and then both programs can agree on the intersection of modes they both support. Braden thinks this makes no sense, generally.

In RFC-172, the FTP protocol allows a “close connection” action to indicate that a file has completed its transfer. He says that they learned the hard way implementing NETRJS at UCLA that this is a bad idea and that closing a connection without an explicit “end of file” notification preceding it should always be interpreted as an error. Otherwise the receiver will never truly know if they've received a full tranmission, or if there was an error!

He wants two methods for storing files, one that overwrites an existing file with the same name, and one that returns an error if a name is taken. (So basically a “write” mode and a “write+replace” mode.)

And he thinks that error codes should be encouraged to include explanatory text.

How to follow this blog

You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, August 25 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

The NIC weighs in

RFC-237 is titled “The Nic's View of Standard Host Names”. It's by Richard W. Watson of the SRI Network Information Center and dated October 5, 1971.

The technical content

The host name saga continues. The names that the NIC uses for hosts and the names that the other ARPANET sites use for hosts have never agreed, and the NIC would like to change that. Watson says that any names chosen need to take the following into consideration.

  • Names should include both the site and the host. The host is the computer itself and the site roughly corresponds to the IMP that the host is connected to (a geographical clustering).
  • Names should be based on institutions and organizations, rather than on computers, since the computers at a host will change more rapidly than the name of the organization.
  • At least 8 characters should be allowed.
  • Host names at a given site should be “unique in the first six characters”.
  • The NIC should be responsible for maintaining and assigning new standard host names.

How to follow this blog

You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

by Darius Kazemi, August 24 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Programmers are lazy

RFC-236 is titled “Standard Host Names”. It's authored by Jon Postel of UCLA and dated September 27, 1971.

The technical content

Here's another entry in what is getting to be a long conversation about host names. In this RFC, Postel is issuing an update to his RFC-229. He recommends that individual sites be consulted before making any naming decisions about their site permanent.

Postel also says:

It has been brought to my attention that programmers are lazy and don't like to deal with character strings longer than one computer word or containing characters other than the capital letters A-Z or the digits 0-9.  Thus, I have included an alternate list which is limited to 4 character names using only the alphanumerics.

How to follow this blog

You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.

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