RFC-140
by Darius Kazemi, May 20 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.
Atlantic City agenda
RFC-140 is titled “Agenda for the May NWG Meeting”. It's authored by Steve Crocker and dated May 4th, 1971.
The technical content
This is the agenda for the big Network Working Group (NWG) meeting that is being held in two weeks' time. It's co-located with the Spring Joint Computer Conference in Atlantic City, meant to take advantage of the fact that a lot of the people involved in the ARPANET will be over there anyway.
There will be discussion of the usual suspects: the IMPs, various file transfer protocols, Telnet, the NIC, data reconfiguration, initial connection protocol, and long-range planning for the network. This has all been planned for in previous RFCs, especially those related to committee work, so I won't go into detail on these items.
Interestingly, discussion time is set aside for people to talk about the similarities between operating system protocols and network protocols! Because coordination over the network is about remote processes talking to each other, these protocols “are similar to interprocesses [sic] communication faciities within operating systems.”
Peggy Karp of MITRE is going to talk about a data management system she is building.
They also plan to spend an evening talking about the NWG itself and how it is “perhaps not optimally organized for technical work.”
Analysis
I'm impressed that this agenda mostly tracks with what they planned a month prior.
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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.