RFC-27
by Darius Kazemi, Jan 27 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.
Adding Raytheon
RFC-27 is a revision of RFCs 10, 16, and 24, which build on RFC-3. All of these documents attempt to define the scope of an RFC. This one was authored by Steve Crocker on Dec 9th, 1969.
The technical content
This document is identical to RFC-24, except for a few typo corrections and the addition of Thomas O'Sullivan of Raytheon.
Analysis
Raytheon is an enormous U.S. defense contractor based in the Boston area. It was founded in 1922 by Laurence K. Marshall and Vannevar Bush. They started as an electronic parts manufacturer for household appliances. By World War II it turned out that their expertise was highly relevant to the manufacture of radar systems and from that point on, warfare was their main business. While they aren't particularly known for their advances in computing, it makes perfect sense that they would have been included in the early ARPANET discussions.
Further reading
If you are interested in computer history you probably know Bush from his article “As We May Think”, published in The Atlantic in the waning days of World War II. In that famous article, he laid out many basic computing ideas in front of a general audience for the first time, including concepts similar to hypertext and the desktop computer. He was an enormous influence on many of the people working on ARPANET, including Doug Engelbart and his lab at SRI.
Thomas O'Sullivan died in January 2007. I mention this mostly because his obituary references a scholarship fund in his name at Science Club for Girls, a really great educational nonprofit in the Boston area that I've had the pleasure of working with. This is me encouraging you to give them some money because hey, it would probably please O'Sullivan. It would certainly please me.
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About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm a Mozilla Fellow and I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with both ActivityPub and the Dat Project.