RFC-156
by Darius Kazemi, June 5 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.
Illinois status
RFC-156 is titled “Status of the Illinois Site (Response to RFC 0116)”. It's by W. Jack Bouknight of the University of Illinois. It's dated April 26th, 1971.
The technical content
This RFC lets people know that Illinois has made the hardware connection from their PDP-11 to their IMP. However, the connection is not in operation as the software isn't done. They expect their Network Control Program to be finished by the end of May. In June they will have the PDP-11 actually installed.
Analysis
This may seem odd, but to connect a computer to an IMP always required custom hardware. So I believe this RFC says “we built the adaptors, but the PDP-11 isn't even online yet and we haven't written the software, for obvious reasons.”
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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.