RFC-153
by Darius Kazemi, June 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.
NIC status
RFC-153 is titled “SRI ARC-NIC Status”. It's by John Melvin and Richard Watson of the Network Information Center on May 15th, 1971.
The technical content
This is a status update on the Network Information Center's activities. They're almost done converting their system to the PDP-10 running the Tenex operating system. They hit some bugs due to a hardware issue: a noisy ground connection on a chip! Now the system only crashes once every other day which is a significant improvement (over what, they do not say).
They're trying to get their Network Control Program and Telnet working, and they want to get the latest Host-Host protocol working as well.
At the moment their system supports local connections of 12 displays and 24 teletypes, though 10 display connections does currently strain the system. They expect that by the middle of summer they'll be able to support from 6 to 12 remote users.
The authors then provide updates on other functions of the NIC, noting that they mail out RFCs within about 48 hours of receiving them from the authors who send them in. This is to account for time it takes to make copies of the documents, and they specifically ask authors to send in a high quality document that they can make copies from.
They recommend people re-read RFC-115 and RFC-118, which lay out some of the operating procedures of the NIC and what types of documents they process.
They close by encouraging readers to contact their Information and Agent Coordinator Jeanne North (AKA Reddy Dively) if they require any help organizing their own document collections at their site.
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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.