RFC-233

by Darius Kazemi, August 21 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.

Four characters is enough

RFC-233 is titled “Standardization of Host Call Letters”. It's authored by Abhay Bhushan and Bob Metcalfe of MIT and dated September 28, 1971.

The technical content

This RFC is a response to RFC-226. As with RFC-229, it offers up an alternative naming scheme for host site mnemonics. The authors suggest that 4 characters is enough for a good mnenomic, and also offer an 8 character alternative. Compare this to Postel in RFC-229 who says that 6 characters is not enough.

How to follow this blog

You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.

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.