RFC-184

by Darius Kazemi, July 3 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.

Supercomputer graphics

RFC-184 is titled “Proposed Graphic Display Modes”. It's by first-time RFC author Karl Kelley of the University of Illinois, and dated July 6, 1971.

The technical content

This is yet another report on a computer graphics system being developed. This one is for the ILLIAC IV supercomputer at the University of Illinois.

Honestly the contents of this RFC are extremely similar to what we've seen in RFC-86, RFC-177, and RFC-178. The main thing of note here is the first usage in the RFC series of “viewport” and “window” as different coordinate systems relative to the user.

Analysis

The ILLIAC IV would go on to be the first supercomputer connected to the ARPANET, though it would not be fully available until November 1975.

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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.