RFC-149
by Darius Kazemi, May 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.
Accommodating Dr. Roberts
RFC-149 is titled “The Best Laid Plans . . .” and is authored by Steve Crocker of UCLA on May 10th, 1971.
The technical content
This RFC informs readers that “Dr. [Larry] Roberts” is unlikely to attend the Monday afternoon Network Working Group sessions in Atlantic City due to a conflict. So they are going to move “Network Planning” and “other ARPA Projects” to different day so that he can be there for those.
Attendees are also told that they should read all RFCs since the last NWG meeting to prepare.
Analysis
If the ARPANET crew at this point was mostly people in their mid-20s, Dr. Lawrence Gilman Roberts must have seemed like some kind of wizened father figure at the ripe old age of 34. As head of ARPANET project from the ARPA side of things, he was one of the six people named on the initial RFC distribution list. In other words, when it comes to high-level planning and ARPA business, Roberts had to present for the two sessions mentioned in this paper, so it makes sense that they moved them for his convenience.
Dr. Roberts passed away on December 26th, 2018, just five days before I decided to start this blog.
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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 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.