RFC-106
by Darius Kazemi, April 16 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 questionnaire
RFC-106 is titled “User/Server Site Protocol Network Host Questionnaire”. It's authored by Thomas O'Sullivan of RDS. This stands for Raytheon Data Systems, which was founded in 1971 by consolidating a few of Raytheon's computing departments.
The technical content
This RFC is a questionnaire for ARPANET site users to fill out. It's intended to gather information about the various computing configurations at the different sites, so that a formal TELNET specification could meet everyone's needs. Recall that TELNET was originally proposed way back in RFC-15, but it was merely a proposal and not a robust specification.
The form asks ten questions, five of which are long-standing ARPANET issues:
- if their system transmits line-by-line or character-by-character
- how do you implement carriage return, line feed, and new line
- how do you handle interrupts
- what's your character encoding
- are you full duplex or half duplex
Analysis
The form is meant to be filled out and then sites will be contacted by telephone to give their answers. I'm unsure as to how they could provide satisfactory answers to some of these questions without diagrams or formulas, though.
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About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with both ActivityPub and the Dat Project. You can support my work via my Patreon.