RFC-302
by Darius Kazemi, October 29 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.
A user test
RFC-302 is titled “Exercising the ARPANET”. It's authored by Roland F. Bryan of the UCSB Computer Research Laboratory and dated February 8, 1972.
The technical content
A group of graduate students at UCSB performed a user test of the ARPANET and this RFC presents their results.
They gave access to the network to a group of people who are “technically competent” but who know nothing about time-sharing, networking, or the ARPANET. They wanted to see what they would be able to do, and what problems arise.
The users were given a brief training and access to NIC documents and then allowed to log in to the system at UCSB. The users had a whole bunch of questions and comments. Some highlights:
- They say a user manual for the Network Control Program at each site would be helpful.
- How can you tell when you're truly logged out if the connection just fails?
- “
How do we make contact with programmers at other sites to develop cooperative programs for file transfer, etc?“ - What are good times of day to connect to each site?
- They point out various bugs.
The users are particularly impressed with MIT and BBN, which provide better documentation than most sites and greatly eased their onboarding process.
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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.