RFC-270
by Darius Kazemi, September 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.
Missing attachment
RFC-270 (PDF) is titled “Correction to BBN Report No. 1822”. It's authored by Alex McKenzie of BBN and dated January 1, 1972. (We made it to 1972, readers! Though the next batch of RFCs are going to take us back to late 1971 again.)
The technical content
McKenzie is reporting that BBN Report No. 1822 has some new revisions due to errors they've found in the documentation. The report has been updated to note that a timeout period of the IMP is 30 seconds rather than 40 (and always has been, the documentation was just wrong).
Analysis
I had a hand in uncovering some missing information about this RFC! If you look at the official text version of this RFC, McKenzie references an attachment, but no such attachment exists in the official text version. In browsing the archives at the Computer History Museum, I found a paper copy of RFC-270 that included the full attachment and then some.
I requested a scan from the museum and sent the scan to the current RFC Series Editor. The RSE uploaded the document and asked me to file an errata report on RFC-270, which you can read here. (Since no changes are allowed to be made to the official text version of the RFCs, any subsequent changes need to be submitted in the form of these reports.) My errata report says, basically, if you want to see the full RFC you should go look at the PDF.
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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.