RFC-188

by Darius Kazemi, July 7 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.

Data management meeting

RFC-188 is titled “Data Management Meeting Announcement” and authored by Peggy Karp of MITRE and Douglas B. McKay of IBM. It's dated January 28, 1971.

The technical content

This RFC announces the first Network Data Management meeting. This meeting was already announced in RFC-173, but this is the formal announcement.

Analysis

The RFC is dated January 28, 1971. I don't believe this date. It doesn't match with RFCs of a similar number (late July 1971), and also the idea that a committee meeting would be planned six months in advance seems very un-ARPANET. Also, according to RFC-173 this meeting was planned as a result of the discussions at NWG meeting at the Spring Joint Computer Conference. Furthermore, all the RFCs referenced in this document were written between April and July 1971.

My guess is that whoever transcribed this in the late 1990s had a brain fart and kept writing “July” as “January”.

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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.