RFC-297
by Darius Kazemi, October 24 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.
Stop your groaning
RFC-297 is titled “TIP Message Buffers”. It's authored by Dave Walden who is now back at BBN after a brief stint at Norsk Data.
The technical content
This RFC is a response to “groaning” about the message buffers on the Terminal IMP (TIP). Walden is here to set the record straight.
While we realize these aren't as big as some Hosts might desire, they aren't as small as the intensity of the groans suggest either.
The TIP has 63 available ports for communication, and the lower numbered ports have bigger buffers than the higher numbered ones. Walden recommends that users of line-oriented systems (which send messages consisting of each line of text, rather than each character of text) try to connect on the lower numbered ports.
He says that they don't dynamically allocate buffers to devices because he estimates the code to do that would eat into the overall buffer space available, reducing the buffer space about about 20%.
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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.