365 RFCs

by Darius Kazemi, October 18 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.

Speakers and protocols

RFC-291 is titled “Data Management Meeting Announcement”. It's authored by Douglas McKay of IBM and dated January 14, 1972.

The technical content

There will be a Data Management meeting from February 23 to 24 at MITRE in Northern Virginia. This is a followup to the meeting that was held in August 1971.

Apparently the last meeting highlighted the need to lern more about potential applications for data sharing, so there will be a series of talks from different groups explaining their use cases. The speakers include:

• Captain Roger Moore of US Army R&D Command speaking about medical file sharing.
• Dr. John Senior of the National Medical Board of Examiners speaking about sharing test results.
• Thomas McCauley of Hughes Aircraft discussing unspecified applications (tentative).
• Richard Watson of the NIC talking about the possibility of distributing the NIC archives across the network.
• Someone from MITRE talking about their work for the Internal Revenue Service.

The other piece of the meeting will be to come to agreements on a spec for a data management protocol. A tentative spec will be sent to attendees ahead of time and the plan is to discuss that rather than start from a clean slate. They encourage attendees to submit their own protocol specs as well. The idea is that this protocol will enable “indirect usage” in the RFC-114 sense of the word where users can simply interact with programs and not worry about the file system structure on a remote server at all.

Analysis

The meeting in 1971 never had any minutes or notes published as an RFC. It's an important reminder that while RFCs are important, they are a small slice of the communication happening inside the Network Working Group.

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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.