365 RFCs

by Darius Kazemi, May 14 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.

Endicott House

RFC-134 is titled “Network Graphics Meeting” and it's authored by Al Vezza of MIT, dated April 29th, 1971.

The technical content

This RFC informs readers that Project MAC at MIT (the home of Multics) is holding a meeting to discuss graphics over the network at MIT's Endicott House (more on that below). It's a 1.5 day long meeting spanning over two nights in July 1971.

The meeting itself was already outlined in RFC-87 back in January, though it was originally planned for April, not July. They suggest submitting papers and working notes ahead of time through the RFC mechanism, and a month before the meeting they will publish a list of reading material that attendees are asked to review before attending.

Analysis

I wish more technical meetings I attended were planned this far in advance with suggested reading material and all that kind of stuff.

Further reading

The MIT Endicott House is an estate located in Dedham, Massachusetts. It's been an MIT conference center since 1955. One important note is its location relative to the main MIT campus: it's actually about 12 miles to the west. This puts it on Route 128 (now also I-95) which some people refer to as America's original “tech corridor”. This would have made Endicott house extremely easily accessible to Lincoln Laboratory, DEC, and BBN personnel. The house is on a relatively secluded estate so this particular meeting would have had an “country retreat” type of feeling to it.

This brief history of the Route 128 tech corridor is a good overview, and there is a 1993 book by Lampe and Rosegrant that seems promising. This paper by Hulsink et al. is a comparison of Route 128 and Silicon Valley as high-technology “clusters” (it should be freely readable since it's an SSRN paper).

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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.